BarCamp Chennai - My Observations

The two day session of BarCamp Chennai came to an end on the 9th of April. It was a nice experience overall.

The event was held at the Ramanujam Centre for Advanced Computing, Anna University and was spread over two days, the 8th and 9th. The location of the venue is really nice. The place is surrounded by lots of trees and is so calm away from the noise and pollution of the city.

The event started about an hour late with the participants trickling in. There was a lot of enthusiam around and the mood was infectious. Kiruba and the other organisers were busy trying to get things in order before the start of the event.

Day 1.

Day began with a small introduction by Kiruba, one of India's best bloggers . He started by welcoming the folks and gave a small talk on the ground rules of the event and some anecdotes on the travails of organising the event. He intoduced Amit, one of the people behind BarCamp Delhi. Amit gave an insight into the history behind BarCamp and how the name came into being. Some of the participants came from Agra, Delhi and Bangalore.

Then came the presentations. There were some interesting presentations by Balaji, Arjun Ram (Taaza.com), Vinu ( mytoday.com), Ganesh of rupya.com, Vijay Anand and other folks. The one that interested me was a talk by Amit Aggarwal, perhaps India's only professional blogger who makes money through his blog. He gave a presentation on how you can make money using Google Adsense and other advertising services on your blog.

Day 1 ended with an informal gathering at a beach resort on the East Coast Road, booze included. Yipee!!

Day 2 beagan with live conferences by Sujatha and Sriram of podbazaar.com, from California on the nuances of podcasting. There were presentations by Ashwin and Moyideen, Prathul Prabhakar and a hot of others.

BarCamp was a good learning experience. There were some sore points though:

1. Wireless connectivity was not upto the mark.
2. There should have been a moderator panel for the presentations

It was the spirit of BarCamp taht mattered in the end. There were no charges for entry and people came to talk about technology, do some social networking and have fun.

See you next time folks.

Checkout some of the photos from the event at www.kiruba.com and http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/barcampchennai/