Above: A background image in Backupbrain.com – a joint project of Tom Negrino and Dori Smith which serves as the offsite storage of Dori’s memory somewhere to store all those links she knew she’d want again someday.

Below: The advertisement of IFMR, inviting applications for their 2007 – 2009 PGDBM courses. The following ad appeared on billboards in certain parts of the city in addition to ads in leading national newspapers and magazines.

So who did who? As Dori of Backupbrain.com points out, the two images are based on 19th century concepts of Phrenology – a theory which claims to be able to determine character, personality traits, and criminality on the basis of the shape of the head.

Noticed this chap staring intently at this magazine while shopping at Landmark.

It was more than a 100 days ago, when a bunch of us got together to spend an evening reminiscent of the BarCamp days, the idea for BlogCamp was born. BlogCamp was intended to be a forum for any Tom, Dick and Harry to learn about blogging – the who’s, why’s and how’s. Initially there was skepticism on why we should have such a forum in the first place. But considering the fact that Chennai happens to be the Indian city with the largest number of bloggers amongst other things, we thought why not.

Then on, there was no looking back. We had meetings almost every weekend to discuss the progress. Things started picking up when interest started brewing amognst some corporate biggies in sponsoring the event. People poured in from all over the country to help organize the event. BlogCamp in some sense is an open source event with people helping in every little way they can and that something truly fantastic!

Ironically, my blog went down for the 2 days that BlogCamp was held due to server maintenance, which by the way was really pathetic. Instead of having to deal with it, I decided to use that as an opportunity to meet folks who had come down from all over the country. These included Dina, Peter, Neha, Jace, Om, Ravages, etc. It was fun catching up with Abhinav, Amit, Shyam, Sathish and a few others (whose names I dont know) from the BarCamp days.

‘How do you feeel now?’ was all that we had to ask in the end.

Analysis of the event to follow. Stay tuned.

There has been a barrage of emails being sent back and forth since late evening from all over India over the supposed banning of blogspot.com and other related blogging sites by Indian ISPs. Is the government beginning to play dirty and curb freedom of expression? Or is this something to do with the recent bombings in Mumbai? Stay tuned as the investigation continues..

List of ISPs that have blocked blospot.com

Update : Airtel customer service confirms site blockage saying that there has been a TRAI directive this morning to block online blogging forums.

Update : Indian Govt. has instructed ISPs to ‘control’ access to blogspot. It seems that some blogs are being used by some terror units (read SIMI) to communicate.There is a crack down in place. IP numbers are being physically located and identified. All should come back to normal once this operation is over. (via mutiny.in)

Update : Are ISPs blocking blogs? – rediff.com does some digging.

Update : Slashdot picks the story on the censorship and so does Boing Boing.

Update : Feed readers like Bloglines and Newshutch can still be used to extract feeds from the blocked sites. Another alternative is to use the pkblogs.com an alternate blog gateway for blogspot.com sites. (via India Uncut)

Update : Several leading dailies including The Economic Times, The Financial Express and The Indian Express have reported on the ban. (via Dina Mehta)

And so, all the good things had to come to an end. BarCampChennai exceeded all our expectations and was one of the best events to have been organized in recent times.

The best part of BarCamps is the people it brings together. Everyone had something to contribute to and it cant get any better than to talk about things you are passionate about. I’ve always had a sceptical view of technology and how it makes people disconnect themselves from things around them. However, all that perception changed after spending 2 whole days at Anna University interacting with people from diverse backgrounds who came together purely for their passion to learn and share knowledge.

How else would anyone have learnt about the students who built a tool that will aggregate all your email and deliver it to your mobile devices; about the simple file tracking device conceptualized for utilizing small scale industries for its production; about news aggregators being built purely for the indian diaspora; about a new programming language being developed that will help visualize all your code; about desinging a large scale citizen database that will help governments in their logistics for delivering services like relief material during calamities, essential commodities for villages etc.; about how to make money blogging (yes!); and may more.

All of this wouldn’t have been possible (at least to the extent that it was) if not for the sponsors who showed tremendous support and encouragement on their part. I would like to thank Kiruba, our sponsors, the team of organizers (who by the way spent a lot of time discussing and shooting emails on Google Groups), the folks at Anna University who put up a fantastic show, making sure that things were running smoothly and all the people who came from different parts of the country to attend and make this event a one of a kind! I would also like to thank Gaurav Bhatnagar of Tekriti Software whom I met in Delhi (and Amit Ranjan of Uzanto, although I didnt get to meet him while in Delhi) for sharing their experiences on conducting BarCampDelhi – the first in India.

Here’s looking forward to much more exciting events in future. Cheers!

BarCampChennai is under session and I’ll be attempting to live blog it. This is my first attempt at Live Blogging and will be updating interesting nuggets of each presentation rather than the whole thing. Watch this space for live updates on BarCampChennai.

BarCamp Chennai – Day 1
Kiruba just gave a small informal introduction and started off the session. The room is filling up and there is a lot of energy in here. Amit Ranjan from Uzanto Delhi is giving his experiences of conducting the Delhi BarCamp

Question: Why BarCamp? Shouldn’t it be called a DhabaCamp for Indian audience??

Ganesh Padmanabhan of Voice Snap is giving a presentation on voice mail application. Sounds really interesting. Check it out at voicesnap.com
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Vinu from Emergic is presenting on MyToday.com – “Do you have Firefox?”, he asks!!! He asks again -”Why dont you have firefox here?” :) We learn that the chap from JustSamachar.com was hired for MyToday.com – nice!
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Vijay of LeadStep talks on Project Infranet (Infrastructure Networks) – he’s looking at developing a framework for streamlining citizen data. It’s a debatable issue and needs to be looked into more deeply.
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Balaji talks on a simple file tracking system that can employ small scale industries to develop it. Interesting little experiment and I’d really love to see it work especially after having worked in the RFID scene for quite some time.
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Narain “mixify” of 360 Interactive talks about Web 2.0 or “Live Web”.
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Arjun Ram of Taazza.com, a news aggregation service in the making, asks “Where are the machans?”. Arjun is working on developing a news aggregation site that will allow you to narrow down your news to lower levels like, “I want to know whats happening in Besant Nagar or Mylapore”. Arjun also demos Taazza. *Interestingness*. An iPod Shuffle is in the offing for the best review of Taazza. Write your reviews and post your link on Arjun’s blog
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Suman talks on NPL – a new programming language that he’s developing that will enable you to visualize code. While the discussion is a little too technical for me, I take a break and apply the Law of Two Feet to check out the session at Track 2.
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Track 2 has quite a packed audience. Amit Aggarwal of Digital Inspiration talks on how to make money from blogging. “Its all about writing with passion at the end of the day”. Amit says that there is a lot of money to be made by just blogging. But is blogging really about making money?
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Back on Track 1, Charles from AdventNet talks on the ZOHO Suite of Applications. ZOHO is attempting to replicate the Office Suite for the web. They’ve got a really nice logo. The applications look interesting but they need to work on the user experience to attract more customers onto their site. Well, thats my 2 cents!
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Muthu from Sun Microsystems, Bangalore is gung-ho about xDesign (User Experience Design). Muthu has been working on user heuristics and usability ever since I’ve known him and is really passionate about it, which, is great!

Day 1 : Its a wrap!

BarCamp Chennai – Day 2
By the time I got here, a session was already in progress. The new Microsoft Office 2007 was being demoed and I did catch a glimpse of exciting things that are expected soon.
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Atul Chitnis talks about Mobile Computing. “Sending an sms using one hand will not get you into trouble in a classroom.” Atul evangelizes the use of mobile devices for computing and believes that the desktop is gonna be replaced by smaller devices for infotainment purposes.

BarCampChennai photos are available here

More updates to follow..

Aamir Khan blogs on Mangal Pandey

Will this set the trend for celebrities to blog about forth-coming films? It will be interesting to watch. Way to go Aamir!

Bangalore Bloggers decided to meet for the 2nd time this year. Lots of new folks this time and highly enthu ones at that. We had a nice time and it was good fun getting to know each and every one of them.

Writeups, pics and video can be found at the following blogs -

• Anand
• Anita
• Bhaskar
• Kiruba
• Krishna
• Muthu
• Prabhu
• Shub
• Suman

What happens when a few bloggers decide to get together on a weekday?
Well, apart from sharing ideas, views and opinions over a cuppa, the cameras rolled and they had their pictures taken. For a brief on what transpired, check Coffee and Conversation’ over at Anitas.