scribble pad

This is my final post on bangalore barcamp.

Taazza

The most impressive presentation of the day was Taazza (watch out the spelling). Its nothing new, but the way it has been done is what differentiates it from other news aggregation sites. Its written in RoR (Ruby on Rails), if you are interested in the technology. You can access news based on time (for the past 1 hour, 2 hours and so on) and location. It has also been integrated with Google Maps, Flickr (flickr integration wasn’t working during the demo). They are also planning to release podcasts of the news which you can listen to in your iPod. They’ve even integrated wikipedia. They didn’t reveal the business model. I thoroughly enjoyed the session. I’ve signed up for the launch, am really looking forward to it.

Pinko Marketing

Earlier in the morning, Tara Hunt gave a presentation on what she calls “Pinko Marketing“. Basically its about building a kick-ass product, getting people to adopt it early on, listening closely to them and incorporating their suggestions. If your product is good, the early adopters (mainly bloggers) will do the rest of the marketing for you. There were some interesting questions during the presentation and the session was very interactive. The slides she used were very well designed.

The story of Barcamp

There was a general lively discussion about how barcamps came about. Chris of Riya talked about his experience organizing the first barcamp and how it has spread so fast to all corners of the world. Others shared their thoughts and experience while organizing the Delhi, Hyderabad and Chennai barcamps. The hall was jampacked.

My camera wasn’t working, thats the reason you don’t see a single photograph in any of the barcamp posts. Also had some trouble using the wireless, but sorted it out on time. Overall, it was a very good experience for me. Hopefully, I’d get chance to attend more barcamps.

Listening to an awesome presentation on mobile photo blogging with 1clickblog. It works like this - you download a client on your mobile, configure it for your blog (one time) and whenever you take a snap, you can sync it with your blog. As of now, it works with all the blogging platforms that have published APIs - typepad, blogger etc and flickr too. You can even get the comments from your blog to your mobile and from your mobile to your blog. Its not one way traffic, you can sync your mobile phone with the new photos as they are uploaded on the blog. As of now, it works with the smart phones. They are in the process of rolling out the client for more and more platforms. The discussion is very very lively with some hilarious moments.

Forgot to mention, why 1 click? Because its just one click to upload the photos from the mobile to the blog.

Chad dickerson just completed his presentation on the hackday at yahoo.  What is a hack day?  Last July Yahoo did their first hack day, the day on which yahoo employees can build prototypes of their ideas and show a demo at the end of the day - innovative way of building new and cool products, don’t you think?  Guess how many prototypes that was built, in that one single day? Ten, thirty, forty?  They had 65 prototypes built at the end of the day.  They replicated it again in March and April.  The India office of yahoo produced 92 prototypes, very very impressive - 92 working prototypes in one single day.  He talked about the experience of organizing such an event.  This is another innovative idea like that of the 20% time Google allows its employees to work on projects of their interest.

Two sessions are running now, one on mobile computing by Atul and the other on the Art of scrum (not sure what it is about). Wasn’t able to decide which one to attend (I think this is going to be a problem the whole day), so attended the mobile computing session, which is still in progress. I like the way Atul is presenting it, each of his slides has just one or two lines, at the middle of the screen. One of the phrases he used caught my attention, while talking about size of the devices (mobile, mp3 player or any other device), there came this question of “how small is small?” and “how big is big?”. Whats the “right” size? This phrase explains it “Sized to be carried”. The talk is good, though there is some repetition.

Saw Tara Hunt (one more of my favourite bloggers) and Chris of Riya. A couple of more guys are blogging live. I’m finding it a little difficult to manage both, (i.e) catching up with the presentation and blogging at the same time.

I’m right now at the Bangalore barcamp, will try to blog live as much as possible. This is my first barcamp and first live blogging, interesting experience. Crowd is slowly pouring in. None of the the first two slots (slots are of half an hour each) 10 and 10:30 ones, have been taken yet. Sathish is giving a talk on podcasting. Going to check the sessions and make note of which ones to attend, as there will be parallel sessions running, cant attend them all

I came across this super short form of poetry called haiku. It is a short verse with 5, 7 and 5 syllables. Some of the poems that I came across were beautiful, amazing how much some people can convey with just a few words. So, at the risk of boring my two (???!!!) readers, I tried my hand at haiku and the result follows

seven star hotel
outside the gate
lots of beggars

My Java program
full of exceptions
what an “exceptional” life

“Flexitime” said boss
“before nine
and after six”

(This actually happened in one of the places I worked, they had put up a notice at the reception “explaining” flexitime)

Board (bored??) meeting
all but speaker
are sleeping

There are thousands of brilliant sites, blogs on the internet. The quality of the content at these sites is very good and it only seems to get better with every post and every update. I’m starting a new category on this blog called “Sites I Enjoy”, to write about the sites that I regularly visit. These sites are pure joy to read, enjoy and learn from. Keep reading, you won’t be disappointed

One of my favourite bloggers, Jason Kottke, has announced that from May he will be allowing ads on his blog (as part of joining The Deck). If you remember, last year he took to blogging full time and was supported by micropayments from his readers, for a full year. For reasons that he describes here, he decided not to continue this model. He has resisted putting ads on his blog for a long time. Personally, I think allowing ads is a good move. As a big fan of kottke, I don’t care about the ads as long as they don’t interfere with my reading experience. It’ll be interesting to see what his readers feel about it, remember the extreme reaction that Heather got when she allowed ads on her site?

Finally, I did it - created a personal blog. I’ve been a reader, lurker at lots (lost count) of blogs for a long time now. I don’t have any idea what i’m going to write, but I guess hope that’s a problem which’ll solve itself, as I try and write more (Scribble Pad, remember?)

Still playing around with various themes provided by WordPress. I’m amazed by the quality and quantity of the themes that have been created for WP and more importantly, given away for free. For example, have a look at this beautiful theme, one of the defaults provided by wordpress.com. If you think about it, giving away themes for free makes a lot of sense. Imagine you are a web designer. You design a beautiful theme and allow bloggers to use it for free. As more and more sites start using it, you get more and more exposure (for free), in terms of backlinks (notice the bottom of this blog, there is a link to the creator of this blog’s theme).

Thanks to Sathish for helping me start.