Last Saturday, the fourth annual Pesta Blogger was held in Jakarta at Rasuna Epicentrum in Kuningan with about 1,500 people in attendance. The event was initiated in 2007 to recognize and celebrate the massive number of Indonesian bloggers as well as being a forum to meet, discuss, convey ideas, and to extend each individual’s personal and professional networks.

According to the organizers, there are now more than a million bloggers in Indonesia with more than 3.2 million blogs. In the social network scene, Indonesia has more than 29 million Facebook users, second only to the USA, and just ahead of the UK.

On Twitter, Indonesia has a 20% penetration rate according to comScore in August, which means there can be anywhere between 6.5 and 8 million users depending on which figure you believe as the number of total internet users in the country. Most reports place the number between 30 and 40 million.

I first attended Pesta Blogger in 2008 but came away sorely disappointed as it was very poorly organized and it was unclear what was happening throughout the day as well as what workshops were being held and where. Having given the 2009 event a miss and hearing overwhelming negative and dismissive feedback, I decided to avoid this year’s event as well, that is until I found out that my wife had agreed to run a booth there.

While I wasn’t keen on attending, I kind of glad that I did because I discovered a handful of tech innovations, one of which I’m excited about, and met with a few people whose projects are worth writing about.

The event itself seems better organized this year, perhaps due to all of the breakout sessions being held in a completely different area from the main hall and the booths. Previously half the sessions were held in the main hall which meant overlapping audio and noise were unavoidable.

Due to the better organization of sessions, it felt much closer to a short and compact version of Barcamp especially as the majority of sessions focused on online activities and issues such as blogging strategies and purposes, video production, community development, creative commons, web technologies, WordPress, and more. All in, there were 39 sessions in nine rooms in over two and a half hours.

Acer, being a major sponsor, took the advantage of three full sessions in one room to promote its products through discussions about small to medium enterprises, women and technology as well as talking about its latest notebooks and Android phones.

Gen Kanai from Mozilla as well as Viking Karwur of id-mozilla were on hand to talk about Firefox and its plan for the browser’s next release.

The US Embassy, which has been sponsoring Pesta Blogger since the beginning, booked two sessions to talk (separately) about kiva.org and the youth culture.

Following the sessions, the organizers announced several awards for prominent and notable local blogs.

While the Minister for Communication and Information had always been present at the opening of the event in previous years, this year it’s the Minister for Education who in his previous role as Communications Minister kicked off the event in 2007

According to Enda Nasution, adviser to the organizing committee and former chairperson of the 2007 event, the minister’s attendance wasn’t initially planned and was arranged at a late stage of the preparations.

In light of the recent disasters that hit the country, organizers and participants held donation drives to help those in affected areas.

The organizers also handed out awards in a number of categories including Best Blogs in Technology (Daily Social), Citizen Journalism (Kompasiana), Entrepreneurship (Strategi Manajemen), Education (Matematika Menyenangkan), and Location Oriented (Blogger Bekasi). There were also a number of competitions held during the run up to the event for photographers, writers, and designers.

This year also saw Pesta Blogger workshops being held across the country form August to October to accommodate those who may have difficulties attending the main event.