wordcamp

I attended the first day of WordCamp India today at Adobe, Noida. For those of you wondering about what WordCamp is all about, it’s a conference that lays down the focus on the WordPress blogging software. This event is attended by everyone from cheeky casual bloggers to sophisticated well known bloggers, developers etc.

It was pretty exciting for me. It was the first time I was attending a conference such as this and it was also the first time that WordCamp was being organized in India. I reached the venue which was Adobe’s office at Noida at around 09:15AM in the morning. We had a quick registration at the entrance where were given our welcome kits and entry passes.

Initially it turned out pretty funny to me. There were people who knew each other (online) and yet couldn’t recognize one another. I guess everyone knew one another by their Twitter handles more than their real names. I was able to recognize LimeIce…err Gursimran after we exchanged a few tweets. Naina recognized me at lunch and so did Inderjeet, Sachin Khosla and Mitesh.

So finally with everyone settled down, the event started with Priyanka (Twilightfairy), founder of Delhi Bloggers Bloc giving the welcome address followed by a great keynote from Om Malik, GigaOm. A few presentations I really liked were Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Art, Amit Aggarwal’s presentation on optimizing Adsense was simply a delight and highly useful and then there was this funny guy, he who must-not-be-named was refreshing. We all loved to laugh at this hopeless guy. Also I should mention here, the lunch was pretty good.

Most of us were busy on Twitter, trying to make all those poor folks who couldn’t attend WordCamp, jealous. I did a live video streaming for most of Amit Aggarwal’s presentation. I’ll make it a point to Tweet more about it tomorrow. I’ll do a few live video streams tomorrow as well. So stay tuned.

At the end of the day we had an open discussion with Matt and Om which was pretty interesting. Someone mentioned Matt Cutts and his blog is a self-hosted WordPress based blog rather than Blogger which most Googlers have. There was this one presentation on copyrights which has been postponed to tomorrow.

Looking forward to a great day tomorrow as well!