Look mom, I found some crayons in BlogCamp

You never know what spending quality time with a bunch of wide eyed bushy tailed young bloggers will transform you into. Never in my life I though I will draw a cartoon, but blogcamp can change that all in one go. In the contest section of the blogcamp.in there was a list of contests. A cartoon contest too. What is an unconference event without participation?

I have this format of usually including an interesting cartoon from gapingvoid.com with each of my post. This made me a big fan of Huge MacLeod. Thanks to Hughtrain wisdom and more, I got this wacky idea of making a cartoon. On the other hand there were far too many interesting thing to write about blogcamp: cartoon bubbled up as an interesting medium to conquer more with less.

Then it was just a matter of opening up gimp and draw the free form figures and fill in the context and punch line. Big salute to Hugh Macleod for showing the way. Here are the piece of pride:

I Dont Know

In a normal conference an expert will pounce at the question ‘What is the model?’ with ‘We have been evolving a model for the past several years… our model takes care of many subtle and fine aspects…’ and push his product or consultancy. But in an unconferance you get a plain and simple ‘I’dont know the right model’

Looser 2.0

Inspired by old timers bragging their antiquity mentioning in passing how long they are familiar with the medium. Was there a seniority fight? Not really.

I am elated to get a response from Atul Chitnis. Now I understand how shutting down comments in his site helps. He can converse all over the place, making newbie like me happy in the process.

Gender Issues

Inspired by Veena’s presentation on Blogging for Indian Politics

Normally I take a spiritual view when gender issues are raised. My stand is they come up due to lack of understanding of the mixup of the subtle and gross within us. But what happened during BlogCamp( undercurrent of agression show to a newebie blogger/speaker) reminded me of the discussion going on: Where are all the smart women speakers? and Okay…rather than just complain… somewhere they mention that women against each other as a big problem.

Disclaimer: I’m no expert nor a keen observer: I’ll be happy to stand corrected, educated, enlightened. Or better still ignored.

Missed Camera porn opp

Blogging and pron go hand in hand, it is a great way to build a community around you. The idea is to entice the onlookers to get in, and get their hands dirty and get hooked in your art. After a very interesting show, Sharad missed a great opportunity to build a small new media following around him. Instead of telling ‘These photographs are taken in slightly better than average cameras, manipulated using photoshop in a 3-year old mac…’, Sharad took the ‘expert apart’ path.

This post and these cartoons, how evercrude they are, is a testimony to the Maxim: ‘enticing your followers to try out your art, by getting their hands dirty’. Hat tip to Hugh!

Now for the usual dose:

Tracking things, information and people in Second Life: Wishful Thinking

I’m exploring and learning Second Life. Things that attract me toward SL are:

1)My area of interest being physical paper file tracking, I want to present some of the paper file location tracking information on to a online collabration tool. And Second Life is a rich and fun candidate to evaluate.

2)I’m following Amazon Web Services and there is so much Second Life buzz on AWS. With a little digging you will know why. Apart from the fact that Jeff Bezos has invested in Second Life, there are efforts to bridge the bland and complex Amazon.com with Fun and immersive SL with AWS playing the lead role of course.

3)There is immediate money to be made in SL. It will be attractive for creative and tenacious photoshop happy client of mien.
4)SL could be an entry for Google Sketchup/Earth geotagging boom set to happen in the mid term.
I’m contemplating a hospital information system visualized through SL. With focus on making it easy to interact with information, things, and people. I’m not discouraged by my present trouble with getting around SL.

Links:
Second Life for a weekend

Amazon Web Services Presentation In Second Life

The Electric Sheep Company

Millions of us

A real hotel in making at virtual world

And for some specific tips while in-world:

Ariane Brodie’s Second Life Tips and Scripts

I met a dude from Bangalore(Thiyagarajan) who was into second life at BlogCamp. I’m surprised by the lack of awareness about SL with the BlogCamp crowd. We were wondering if there will be a SL track next time around!
I’ll add it to my wish list.

A room full of Mr Bean: BlogCamp Rocks on Day 1

BarCamp opened with a short talk by Kiruba the key organizer, describing BlogCamp as ‘Organized Chaos’. Funny enough the ‘organized ‘ sounded like organized as in ‘organized crime’. As per the plan, chaos there was plenty, it was like a roomful of Mr Bean doing their antics. My Mr Bean quirk was sitting in a WiFi zone without a WiFi device( Aside: one of the interns in the office decided to put my NetGear WiFi device to better use elsewhere and so I am WiFi challenged!)

Then it was Atul Chitnis’s turn to fiddle with the hornet’s nest by bringing up the topic of disabling comments in his dino blog. It did not create the necessary effect though. It was nice drama to watch the topic being struck off the physical wiki perhaps due to Atul showing up a bit late, Dina not pinged by Atul in time.

Before that there was a shout out like session on how ‘Blogging changed your life’ Dina and Neha had some real interesting real story to tell. Then it degenerated into people talking about their pets, toe nail, wife and girl fri.en.ds

Then it was promotion of BlogStree.com by Veer Chandra Bothra. Beaten by Technorati( Veer says Blogstreet got out of that business) blogstreet is into tracking Indian blogs. There were some interesting statistics. And a lament that blog is so PC centric and PC penetration is still so poor. Here is a strange situation for sponsors, they cannot grind their axe in an unconference, but blogstreet which is not a sponsor gets away with it. I am confused here.

Then it was Jace( Kiran) discussing Conversation. He was raving about livejournal and inadvertently promoting Six Apart. Small talk’s role in the conversation aspect was very interesting. ICICI sucks seems like a pet peeve that got addressed by ICICI amply. Conversations are about fragments and snippets culminating into something interesting and authoritative. Unlike the one shot 4000 word ‘well researched’ article by BrickyPedia.

Then I went to the Geeky Session track. Where there was bit one sided religious war between WordPress and Blogger. There was enough chaos in the demos and sound bites like: “I need a flickr account; Your Yahoo Id is your flickr account…; do you have password for this account…”

As usual Aswin was confidently defending(on templates) WordPress like: “WordPress allows you to edit CSS…”. I don’t know what the N00B users though, but it was very funny for me.

The best metaphor of the day was by Aswin( again on templates) was: “Just like we humans like to wear different cloths daily, blogs got templates to wear” Good show Aswin!

Lunch was good. It was good opportunity to network.

Then there was collobrative blogging session. It was a case of moderators/session coordinators hogging. Inadvertent of course! Dina, Neha, Peter are passionate about it. And it shows. Too bad they happen to be session coordinators too. My observation was Neha realized it and whispered it to Peter and order( that is chaos) restored. I’m used to geeks doing this kind of things. Watching ‘non geeks’ doing it was like watching couple of chubby ‘Suese Derkins’ and a Charlie Brown mashup. Wisdom that emerged out of the session was: “I don’t know”, “Self Organizing is better”, “Stay out of the way”, and “There must be scope for subgroups, and subgroups with counter/anti culture”

Then there was open source blogging by Scott Carney who obviously is from abroad as he passionately thinks RTI can be used to get day to day information. Soon he will realize that RTI will go the way of PIL. Hmm, there is this ChennaiOneEyedBaby tag effort… let us see…( Aside: Scott(confused looking): “How to give a Tag?” very funny)

Then there was a pitch by www.merinews.com which was feeble. I’dont understand their business model. Well they are sponsors. give them a hi fi!

Then it was ramanujamp.blogspot.com/ going through the motion of presenting his case for group blogging.

Then there was a really really well done well ordered session by Amit Agarwal on making money with blogging.

Then it went on to SEO and SEM. They deserve a full post. But it seems, cribbing about boss is a good bet to get traffic!

I’m skipping the beach party coz it is Mahalya Paksham. If you don’t understand it don’t bother!

BlogCamp Chennai all set to be a Blast

It is going to be unconference time again. BlogCamp.In bigger and bouncier unconference of Indian Bloggers is all set to rock on 9 and 10 Sep.

The lineup of sponsors and celeb is heady. Sunil Gavaskar who is podcasting cricket these days is going to be there not to mention the usual suspects like Atul Chitnis and Amit Agarwal.
There is so much energy by the organizing team lead by Kiruba.

I’m pulling in Prasad of UPSL to the BlogCamp and the interaction is extremely productive and exciting. If things turn out as I envisage, I will have something really interesting to share….