Down to the wire with Pesta Blogger

Today is the eve of Pesta Blogger and things are starting to come together. I just had lunch with Mr Brown, one of Singapore’s most prominent bloggers who will be at Pesta Blogger today and take part in the breakout session on Bridging the Gap.The session would be moderated by one of Indonesia’s most influential bloggers,

Ndoro Kakung and Unspun, a nobody. (I’ll focus on some of the sessions that would be conducted at least partly in English. Information in Bahasa Indonesia on Pesta Blogger is already plentiful.)

It should be interesting to get Mr Brown’s sometimes hilarious take on the gaps in understanding between the neighboring countries of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.

The last time Unspun checked, Indonesia was accusing Malaysia of stealing its culture, Malaysia was accusing Singapore of stealing its food to the extent that it was thinking of patenting some of the more popular dishes.

Bridging the gap of another sort is Arsalan Iftikhar, who would be Skyping in from Washington. Arsalan is a correspondent in the Anderson Cooper 360 program on CNN. Healso blogs as The Muslim Guy and was recently named by Elan as one of “The 10 Best Twitter Accounts Muslims Should Follow.”His Twitter handle is @TheMuslimGuy.

He’ll be discussing perception gaps between Muslims and the West and other countries. He should also have some fresh insights on what Muslims  should do in the social network space to bridge the gaps.

In the breakout session on Photo/video blogging will be Kristupa Saragih, Anto and Anothony Bianco, an Australian blogger who has been travelling rough through Sumatra and Java since the begining of this month just to get to Pesta Blogger. He’s been roughing it so much that he was in a stupor of sleep his afternoon that he missed lunch with Mr Brown, Unspun and Beradadisini.

The Beyond Blogging breakout session will feature Corvida Raven, the “Opra of the Net”, Koprol’s Satya

Witeolar, Joko Anwar and Mark Frauenfelder, the co-founder of Boing Boing.

And flying up from Sydney will be Brian Giesen, a digital influence specialist who will take part in the Breakout Session on Blogpreneurship, together with Fashionese Daily, Nukman Luthfi and Roni Yuzirman.

The breakout sessions start at 2pm and goes till 4pm.

The Pesta Blogger itself starts at 10am shart but re-registration and ticket sales start at 8am. So far over 1,100 people have registered but many participants are hoping to walk in and buy tickets, so if you’re planning to come then come early as we’re expecting a crush of people at the door and there may be a queue even though we are trying tp process eight lanes of participants in one go.

So see you guys at Pesta Blogger 2009 tomorrow at the SMESCO Building.