Registration for the inaugural Eat. Drink. Blog. Food Bloggers Conference 2010 have now closed, and invites were sent out this morning. I must admit I was surprised at the interest shown as we had close to 100 registrations!

Unfortunately, we are limited by both venue size (45 people only) and cost, so we can not extend an invitation to everyone.  As I’d like to keep this process transparent, I’ll explain our rationale below.

An invitation was automatically extended to panel members and conference organisers.

Next, the attendee list was reduced by removing people who a) didn’t have a current blog, or b) had only been blogging a very short time (ie. in the last few months).  Yeah, it was a tough call, but it had to be made.

We then extended invites to bloggers from interstate, to ensure we had a good cross-section of bloggers from across Australia. There weren’t many, so this also seemed logical.

And to the remaining attendees on the list, well, we left it up to the good ol’ random list generator.

As the RSVP’s come in, we’ll probably have a few more spots pop up, and we’ll be offering these consecutively to the people on the randomly generated list.  And for those unable to attend on the day, you won’t miss out too much as we’ll be publishing video-casts of some of the panel discussions.

If all goes well this year, we’ll plan for bigger and better things next year, where we can hopefully accommodate everyone.