The news was not unexpected, yet somehow was still surprising when it came today.

The two big (for-profit) new media conferences, Blog World Expo and the New Media Expo are combining into a new annual event, The Blog World & New Media Expo. The hybrid conference inaugural run will be at the Las Vegas Convention Center (site of both former events in 2008) October 15-17, 2009.

Blog World Expo’s founder, Rick Calvert, and New Media Expo founder, Tim Bourquin, are longtime acquaintances and fellow trade show organizers. On his blog, Bourquin says he is “handing over the reins” to New Media Expo to Calvert’s team, in order to take that conference “to the next level.” Bourquin calls the combined show “a great move for both attendees and exhibitors.” Calvert, in turn, says the event “will truly be the comprehensive, industry-wide event that Tim and I had both searched for.”

Bourquin’s New Media Expo is the longer-running of the two events, and debuted in California in 2005 as the Podcast Expo, with a focus on (duh) podcasting and downloadable media. As podcasters’ needs and interests expanded into other new media, the event name also morphed, to Podcast and Portable Media Expo in ’06, then Podcast and New Media Expo in ’07, and finally moved to Las Vegas as the New Media Expo earlier this year.

After this year’s New Media Expo, Bourquin talked candidly about the challenges of running a for-profit technology industry trade show, and mused whether it was worth staying in the business.

Calvert’s BlogWorld Expo debuted more recently in fall 2007. In “Internet years”(which are like dog years, but even more accelerated), being two years newer yielded a far different conference experience. While it also touched on podcasting (and boasted Podango, Wizzard, Blog Talk Radio and Blubrry among their exhibitor/sponsors), BlogWorld Expo’s first year focused mostly on blogging. There was a military blogging focus, and a “Godblogging” session track, and it seemed the BlogWorld Expo sessions and exhibits (at least that inaugural year, when I attended), skewed toward the more conservative end of the new media spectrum.

The acquisition of the New Media Expo, with its dedicated following of podcast creators, is a smart move for Calvert and the BlogWorld Expo. What remains to be seen is whether the combined conference will still attract and preserve the funkier end of the personal media spectrum, and whether the podcast and downloadable parts of the New Media universe will be accommodated.