BlogcampPune

I was at the BlogcampPune, on my trip to Pune this weekend.
Extremely well handled. It was definitely one of the best barcamp/blogcamps I’ve ever been to. I got a chance to meet a lot of interesting people during this camp.

The camp was attended by about 150-200 bloggers/techies/newbies/journos. Ya, I started wondering what the journalists were doing, untill I realized they were there thanks to the sponsors, and their launches. A lot of sponsors, always means a lot of hardwork saved for the organizers. Facilities, food, etc. etc. But the downside, is the attention they try to grab. In BlogcampPune’s case,( and this angered a lot of attendees) was the marketing pitch all the sponsors went around making.

Here are some pictures from the blogcamp.

Nice long agenda. Following the tradition of unconferencing, there were a lot of last moment changes to the schedule.

Purplenova product manager presented the new software available to download for free. Purplenova converts your home computer into a hosting place. ( I have a lot to say about this, so I’ll do that in an other post. Look out for it.)

Sulekha. Boasting about the user-community they have generated. Well, they have done a great job at a lot of things. Have to give it to them for that. Definitely not easy, being one of the portals thats been around for a long time.

Few of the big sponsors. The event for the camp ws SCIT, Pune.

This was the session, where most of the cameramen, journalists, seemed to be looking for. Wasn’t difficult to guess who called them there in the first place.

Rediff, it was. It launched Blogshowcase, a new service/networking site it has come up with. You can submit your RSS feed here, and have a user-community reach your, rate you, give their opinion, etc etc. Win-win situation for both Rediff and the bloggers, I guess. Bloggers will get traffic and a wider audience. Rediff increases its userbase. And, sooner or later, Rediff will start advertising on these pages.

Just like any other camp/conference…this one had some good food !

Lunch was followed by chaos, and lots of threads running continiously. As I hopped between these, I forgot to take pictures.

The picture above is of Thakkar from Sms Gupshup, a webaroo product, which allows you to send group sms to your friends. Forming communities over mobile phones. Seen that before, never in India though. Should be fun to see if it works.

Then there was podcasting by this guy from PooraPoona who was wondering if I could do a regular comic strip for their youth maganize.(I’m still considering).

There were a few other sessions, one from Melody ( from Mumbai) who spoke about dangers lurking on the net, and an other one about traditional media vs new media.

Then there was Ankesh Kothari, who spoke about ‘how to get your blog traffic from 100 to 15k in 4 weeks’ or something similar. I keep forgetting. This was one of the most interesting talks, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I’ve always loved creativity and entrepreneurship.

And here is a picture of a few people I met at the camp.

Hope to attend a lot more of these conferences/camps. And also speak at a few. Hmmm…..