Eat.Drink.Blog. 2010

I was one of the fortunate bloggers who attended the inaugural Australian Food Bloggers’ Conference.  Eat.Drink.Blog

It came together as a labour of love, and is testament to how much the wonderful members of our blogging community love what they do.  Those who made it happen were generous with their time, their ideas, their spirit and their friendship.

What do food bloggers talk about at a conference though?  Well, put 45 of us in a room and you will discover that we find a lot to talk about.

The informative first session on How and why we blog, led by Gill from confessions of a food nazi, Reem from I am Obsessed with Food and Zoe from Progressive Dinner Party highlighted that there as many answers as there are bloggers and touched on where we sit in comparison to the mainstream media and how we are viewed by it (not very favourably on most counts).

There are lots of reasons why I blog.  Too many to fit here, so I will leave them for another post.  Take it as read that a consuming passion for food is the common thread that links the what, where and whyfor.

Next session was on the Practicalities of Photography.  Now, a good blogger would have taken a photo at this point to capture panelists Ellie, Nola and Matt sharing their tips and tricks.  Not me. I had my head bowed in shame and was furiously writing down some very obvious and sage advice.

Read. The. Manual.

You know, the one that you got with the camera.  That one.  Read it.

All three mentioned it several times.

Yes.  Always meant to do that.  Didn’t really think that all of the information contained within would just find its way into my head by osmosis or anything.  Just hadn’t got around to it.  Yet.

Some of the other handy tips that I have deciphered from the scribble that was flowing like lava from my pen include:

• Get your eyes tested,  you may find it difficult to get the camera to focus properly if you can’t
• Style and prop your shots before you have made the dish so that all you need to do is put the food on the plate and shoot
• Make extra so that you can eat yours hot, style the remaining later (when it won’t steam up the camera lens) and have the it for lunch the next day
• It doesn’t cost each time you click, so keep clicking until you get the shot you want

The morning had flown by.  It was time for lunch, provided by one of our lovely sponsors St Ali.  Surrounded by others furiously snapping, I did pull out my camera and manage to get a shot of my simple but tasty sandwich.

Back into the space at The Essential Ingredient that is normally used for their cooking school and Claire and Ed took the floor to discuss Copyright, Ethics and Legalities

Not the dry subject you might expect, we covered important areas such as the commonsense guidelines if you receive freebies, the impact of trade practices laws and how not to get scared by letters from lawyers.

Throughout the day we had a scrolling Twitter wall projected behind the panelists.  The steady stream of tweets from those present provided more than a few laughs and evidence of the addiction we all seemed to have to our i-Phones.

Next on the agenda was SEO and how to be social.  Penny gave us an insider’s view of how to make the most of social media and networking and how you can use them to drive traffic to your site.  Michael said the word “links” approximately 52 times in ten minutes and explained why you need incoming ones to help your page ranking on Google, and we were immersed in the importance of place by Brian.  I am yet to work through the notes I took (yes, I took notes!) but look forward to remembering the discussions on keywords, aggregation and collaboration and the importance of being social online and offline.

Our final session for the day was Making money through blogging.  This one was of interest to me because I am in the process of working out if it’s worth it.  It is possible.  Jules and Phil confirmed this.  It is a hard slog though, and will require consistent and constant effort.  The key points I took from this panel were:

• Click through advertising won’t do it
• Affiliate sales have potential
• Progress in e-books and on demand printing mean that self publishing no longer needs to have a huge capital outlay

So, part one of the day over and it was time to head to St Ali.  Not expected there until 5:30pm a number of us whiled away the time at a nearby pub.  When the time came, the exodus was as quick as you could say “Der Raum”.  So eager was our merry band of bloggers for the innovative cocktails that lay ahead that I bore witness to the following crime against beer.  Michael from My Aching Head was rightly aghast.

St Ali was getting into the mood on this pleasant autumn evening.  The laneway was blocked off,  choons filled the air and it felt like a bit of a street party.

The next couple of hours was sipping on cocktails, checking out the SBS Food Food Bloggers’ Photography Exhibition and mingling.

Just as we were all getting itchy tastebuds it was time to move into St Ali to commence our Bloggers’ Banquet.

I failed again as a food blogger as I was far more focussed chatting to the others on my table than I was in getting photographs of each course of our feast.  Some did get captured, including the wonderful kingfish heads, replete with the much talked about fish eye.

It was a great event.  In the days following the conference the Twitterverse was abuzz with debriefs, postmortems, and many new followers.

Enormous recognition and thanks must go to

the organisers:  Reem, Ed, April and Mellie

our MC:  Tammy

the panellists: as mentioned above

and the sponsors, whose generosity took the day to another level:

• The Essential Ingredient provided the venue, staff and a prize for a tweet your favourite @EsntlIngredient competition.
• SBS Food sponsored the exhibition of photographs from food and wine blogs,  and provided each attendee with a little goodie bag to take home.
• St Ali provided attendees with lunch and the evening meal by chef Ben Cooper, plus the space for the exhibition and kick-off cocktail party.
• Der Raum provided some seriously inventive cocktails and drinks.
• Prentice Wine provided a corker of a wine matched to our evening meal.
• Red Hill Brewery slaked our thirst with some local hand crafted ales.
• Daylesford and Hepburn Springs Mineral Springs Co kept us hydrated throughout the day with sparkling mineral water and soft drinks.