Blogcamp.in – First Impressions

In case the badge at the right is not “in-your-face” enough, I should mention here that I’m attending Blogcamp.in on my company’s steam.

In the interest of keeping this blog as anonymous as its always been, I’m obviously not going to mention what I’m speaking on but people who know me can obviously figure that out!

The conference is happening at Tidel Park in Chennai which is a fairly fancy tech park but with some serious security! We had to pass through 3 levels of security before we even entered the building (after passing through a metal detector.)

My first big gripe about the conference is that during the registration (when we pick up our freebies, which by the way are fairly decent) is that we had to fill out a short form from Yahoo! (who are the “platinum” sponsors of the event) where we basically agreed to let them spam us. I quickly overwrote the bits where they said “I agree” and “Yahoo can” blah blah changing them to “I DO NOT agree” and “Yahoo can NOT.” The guy at the registation desk mutely took back my form, I’m not sure if he actually saw what I did! 🙂

The entire morning I was offline since in a very “doh!” moment, I remembered that I should have packed my wireless network card only after I got to the airport. I thought this place would have ethernet ports around that I could use, but no. And that was my second gripe. The connectivity is provided by Sify and they have a pretty decent WiFi zone set up but if you want to plug in through ethernet, you’re out of luck. I’m also carrying along my portable HDD which has all my portable apps on it so I thought I could just plug into the desktops they have around for free access. Except the desktops were the junk iWay systems which wouldn’t let me plug in my HDD into their USB ports. Gah!

I only managed to get online because I had a crossover cable and connected it to a helpful guy’s laptop. Phew!

The talks in the morning were quite blah. Someone from Sulekha was up first and I missed the bulk of his talk since we got here late. An open session where bloggers shared their experiences followed which had some fun anecdotes but also had some guys drone on about some story that only they got the point of. After a coffee break, Atul Chitnis was up with “Blogging in the 90s: A Dinosaur’s Tale.” The only thing to like about this was that Toolz is finally calling himself a dinosaur. Lets hope he goes extinct soon!

The parallel session going on in another room seemed interesting on paper. Intro to WordPress, WordPress Hacks were a couple of the topics. But when I popped into that room, it was mostly geek boys using the word “like” altogether too many times!

Lunch followed which was quite yummy but only veg.

I’m sitting right now in the afternoon session which is on “Collaborative Blogging” while a session on Podcasting is going on upstairs.

More later or tomorrow if I’m too bored today! 😀