Convention Reporter

As Worldcon continues, those of us not there can only follow from afar. So far it seems that my Twitter feed is more active than my RSS/blog feed, but here are a few stalwart bloggers reporting in:

Audio of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Guest of Honor speech [Courtesy of Gary Kemble, who is reporting for ABC news]

Random Tangent has been to many panels:

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Rani Graff has some Flickr photos up

Julia B is learning from the Pros

Members of the Outer Alliance are there

Megan of Literary Life was on her first Lit panel

With any luck that gives you a taste of the Con so far. Enjoy!

A warm welcome to Rene Sears on our Dragon*Con team. Also welcome back John Scalzi (though please note that he’s Twitter only, he’s still on vacation from Whatever).

The hastag for Dragon*Con appears to be #dragoncon and we have a tracker up for that now.

Wi-fi in the convention center at Melbourne was excellent yesterday so we anticipate no problems bringing you the Australian Awards ceremony tonight. News on the Hugo Awards coverage will follow once we have confirmed the timings.

We are delighted to announce several more Australian reporters.

First of all the ladies of Galactic Suburbia have offered their personal blogs and Twitter feeds as follows:

• Alex
• Alisa Krasnostein
• Tansy Rayner Roberts

In addition we have Gary Kemble. Gary is a horror writer, and also a reporter on social media for ABC News (that’s the Australian Broadcasting Company). We are delighted to see someone from a mainstream news outlet covering the convention. Gary has a Twitter list that follows lots of Australians who are planning to attend Worldcon.

We are continuing to refine our use of hashtags for Worldcon. We have dropped #hugo as it was being swamped by tweets about Venezuelan politics and men’s clothing. We have dropped #A4 because it was being swamped by tweets about Audi cars. We have added #aussiecon and #hugoaward as we have seen people using them and they appear to be unique to us.

The preferred hastags are: #aus4, #hugos and #Worldcon.

We have noticed a few issues around the use of hashtags for this year’s Worldcon.

As usual, #Hugo is attracting lots of tweets about Venezuelan politics and mens’ clothing. #Hugos works much better.

In addition people are complaining that #Aussiecon4 is too long, and are looking for an alternative. #A4 appears to be attracting a lot of unrelated tweets from Europe. The current suggestion appears to be to use #Aus4. We’ll keep watching and adjust our Twitter trackers accordingly.

Fun Funds are wonderful institutions whereby kind fans club together to send one of their number on a trip to a convention far away. The lucky recipients of this generosity have to promise to entertain their benefactors by writing about their adventures. You can learn more about Fan Funds here.

Ireland’s James Shields is the 2010 GUFF Delegate. Fans from Europe are paying for him to visit New Zealand and Australia for Au Contraire and Aussiecon 4. James is making full use of the Internet to keep people back home informed about his travels. See what James is talking about here.

Au Contraire is now in full swing. I have been blogging briefly about it here, here, here and here. The rest of the team has arrived, as has a delightfully large international contingent of visitors on their way to Melbourne.

Internet access is patchy, but if we can solve the problem of why, despite an excellent signal, some people can’t connect to the hotel wi-fi, then we should be fine for the Sir Julius Vogel Awards on Sunday.

Meanwhile most of us have a small travel-related problem to tackle. Jay Lake explains succinctly here.

We are delighted to add the following to our team.

At Aussiecon 4

• Jonathan Strahan
• SF Strangelove
• The team at Galactic Suburbia

At Dragon*Con

• Andrew Mayer
• Mary Robinette Kowal

Staff

• Karen Burnham

A number of people have been kind enough to offer their services as reporters. The team currently looks like this:

At Au Contraire in Wellington, NZ

• Jay Lake
• Errol Cavit
• Mike Willmoth
• Cheryl Morgan

At Aussiecon 4 (Worldcon) in Melbourne, Australia

• Jay Lake
• Catherynne M. Valente
• Paul Cornell
• Rani Graff
• Mike Willmoth
• Cheryl Morgan
• Kevin Standlee

At Dragon*Con in Atlanta, GA

• Lou Anders
• John Picacio
• Tom Stidman

Update: Mike Willmoth added

It is that time of year again, and this time around we have a small appetizer for you as well. The New Zealand NatCon (Au Contraire) takes place in Wellington the week before Aussiecon 4. We intend to cover that too, hopefully with live coverage of the Sir Julius Vogel Awards.

So, if you are going to be at Au Contraire, or at Aussiecon 4 (or, like me, at both), and plan on blogging, tweeting, taking photos or doing any other sort of online coverage, please let us know so that we can help you find an audience. Either comment here or email us (staff [at] conreporter.com).

Also, if you can’t make it out to the conventions (and I know a lot of you can’t), please consider helping out by offering to do round-up posts here. Kevin and I will probably be run ragged in Melbourne and we could do with some help.

Of course if you are going to be at Dragon*Con and would like to report from that instead, we’d be delighted to have you.

See this page for the information we can use to incorporate your reports into this site.

I have created a Twitter list (@conreporter/worldcon2010) for people to follow and will add all tweeting reporters to that. If you have an iPad, following that on FlipBoard might be a cool thing to do.