Indonesian Bloggers Festival 2009

The Indonesian Bloggers Festival is coming up!

Tomorrow, an aeroplane will fly away from all this cold crazy Melbourne weather to land on the airstrip of the humid hot crazy Jakarta weather, with me in it.

Just a background on the festival: this is the third Indonesian bloggers festival. The first one, which was on October 27th, 2006, attended by around 500 bloggers.

According to one of its founders, Ong Hock Chuan, it was meant to be a small gathering at first, but then it grew and grew until, this year, around 1.200 bloggers are expected to attend from all over Indonesia.

And a few words on a word which is very important for Indonesian bloggers: ‘kopdar.’

It is an acronym of kopi (coffee) darat (land). Which basically means ‘to meet up in real world’. This is a word that has been used since the day of CB radios. Basically, if you are a blogger in Indonesia, there is an expectation for you to join a blogging community, such as Bandung Bloggers Village in Bandung, and Bali Bloggers Community in Bali. And the blogger communities organise these ‘kopdar’ events -lunches, dinners, going to an event together, where bloggers meet socially. Just for fun. And sometimes for content gathering together.

Which I think is a cool idea. We often ‘forget’ that people exist behind all those blogs.

(Am I excited? Yes. Not only about the bloggers festival: Real Indonesian food! Here I come! Woohoo!)

This entry was posted on Friday, October 23rd, 2009 at 1:59 pm and is filed under People, Things, onemilestories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.