Pune BlogCamp -2

8.30 am - Kick in

Bloggers, both professional and waiting in the wings have started gathering at the registration counter. There is excitement in the air. No one knows what lies ahead. Volunteers pitch in for work that requires immediate attention. Registrations are done, T-shirts distributed and someone is around to take a snap of each participant not before they have worn it and displayed their name card in mug shot style.

10.00 am

Tarun sets the ball rolling. The hall is kind of full. Around 150 participants are there now. Lot of student community can also be seen. A general round of intros are made. Some keep it short & simple, others put in their marketing speel, which gets booed. There are some interesting characters around. For instance a person who introduces himself and tells the audience he does photo blogging and after a small pause informs he mostly shoots photos of his neighbours and posts it on his blog!!! Everyone breaks into a laugh and tease him about the place where he lives and give ideas on how he can increase traffic to his blog by doing live streaming/video casting of his neighbors ;-) The person sitting next to him gets up and introduces himself as his neighbor - again the audience breaks into laughter!!! There are some 'celebrity' bloggers also in the crowd. Prem Paniker of rediff.com (liked his Lord of the Strings tee) and Sakshi Juneja who in some way is unofficial PR agent of rakhi sawant make their presence felt. So popular is she on the blog space that she even had a stalker follow & harass her, which she shares in a discussion later in the day. Interesting to see that there are a few guys who have made blogging as their full time career and earn their bread & butter out of it! One of them even shares some of his trade secrets on how to popularize your blog in a session later. Then there is a guy who plans to start a blog for men without gfs!!! ;-) Over all, pretty interesting bunch of people and you know it would be one hell of a knowledge sharing & learning session.

10.30 am -5.00 pm

Lot of presentations are on the whiteboard. 2 Different threads are started. Some of the interesting thread that I attend include a presentation made by Purple Nova guy who has a product in market that turns your home PC into a hosting platform & there is no need to have a Ip address to host your stuff which means, no need to depend on a hosting provider for Ip address, space, other hosting needs etc. Blogging through SMS? Sounds mind boggling isn't it but if you believe the guys from SMS Gupshup, it's the next big thing and already it has picked up a lot. Btw, even i tried my hands on it and created my 1st virtual SMS blog, sitting there. Abhishek Thakkar's gigantic personality & his witty style of presenting the SMD Gupshup funda was hard to miss. More details about it can be found on their site. Oh btw, did I mention that the entire campus was wifi enabled. Many bloggers did live blogging from the campus. The signals were weak at times so many of us, including myself had a hard times logging in. Melody made an interesting presentation on flaming & how to tackle with it. There was another interesting discussion on podcasting and another one made by Niresh Kothari on how to popularize your blog. He is the same guy who runs around 15 blogs & website and has made blogging as his full time career. The guys from Fropper shared the concept of ezeblogging through their template driven blogging approach. Those who are new to blogging would find it very easy & useful. The Sulekha presentation didn't really go well with the audience, probably more to the fact that they were trying to 'hardsell' Sulekha as the best thing that happened around, which bloggers were not so ready to accept. Also the the fact that Sulekha branded themselves as web2.0 platform based site but couldn't respond back convincingly to the web 2.0 related queries that people had.

5.30pm - Kick out

experience sharing, feedback session and next steps were discussed. The knowledge sharing session was worth the day spent. Not to mention meeting so many people with diverse background and getting to know them. Looking fwd to the next Bar Camp now.