Weekend at the Blogcamp

Sitting in my office cafeteria and flipping through the day’s Hindu, I came upon a small snippet of a write up on a blogger’s meet here in Chennai. Hmmm… blogging has always held my fancy, but I never did justice to it. But oh! … hold it … it was on the following weekend … and that too a few blocks away from my workplace. The thought of a much awaited weekend slipping through your fingers and a dreadful journey to this uncivilized, God-forsaken, outer-space of beautiful Chennai was more than I could battle. But there it was … like a freshly pulled out luscious plump carrot dangling in front of a worn out Bugs Bunny. So … to cut the long story short, I went to the Blogcamp 2006.

It was held at Tidel Park. (God! … at least it was held in a comfortable place with decent air-conditioning!)Down at the auditorium in front of a large banner bill board flanked on both sides by white screens, semi circularly skewed rows of tables and chairs were laid with a good number of power terminals for the attendees’ laptops. The atmosphere was very cool and casual (its got to be that way … it’s a blogger’s meet … not a UNESCO conference!) Boy! that really made me feel at home. Since I was on the confirmed “extra” attendee list I had to take a modest position among the back benchers. That suited me well to study the happenings better. There was a very unofficial introduction to the camp by Kiruba followed by some others. They explained that the program schedule was purposely not fixed, in order to allow it to be dynamically determined based on the interest flows and expertise of the attendees.

Half-an-hour into the event, I began to feel out of place. Everyone around me was a veteran blogger, blogging for the past 4 to 5 years minimum. Almost everyone had a cloud of blog sphere popularity built around them. And … none of them was a techie or a geek … (ofcourse there were quite a few of them … but all somewhere in the front and none sitting any where in my vicinity.) Looking around I made friends with a fellow blogger. A few more minutes followed by a short what-is-coming-up-next break, I turned around to make friends with the lady sitting next to me. And what do u know?… she is a die hard blogger with a celebrity profile at multiple blogging platforms. As time sped by we got to know each other more … I had quite a lot to learn.

Over the weekend (sat & sun) I managed to find sessions of my interest (as the majority there termed it … the geekier happenings of an otherwise sane and normal event). There were seasoned techies talking about Wordpress and Blogger Beta, SEOs (Search Engine Optimizations), Technorati, science blogging, podcasting, and a whole lot of amazingly cool stuff. To me the whole event was quite interesting as I hoped it would be. And oh! … As part of the give away freebies, there was a shoulder bag from Yahoo! Inida, a solid ceramic mug, a book of humorous articles from Peguin, a scribbling pad and pen from ZOHO. And the food … everybody liked it unanimously. On the whole it was a well spent weekend. As I walked away from the Blogcamp back home, I promised myself to log more regularly and try and contribute in some way to the next Blogcamp event. So here I am full of promises and soda pop enthusiasm.