Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

Blogcamp is tomorrow. I’ve been on the planning list the last few weeks (mostly lurking) and now have a better sense of what’s going on.

As noted before, the core planning team has been far more concerned with staging a grand event than with figuring out what is going to make it so grand. To this end, they’ve done a remarkable job. They’ve also turned out to take criticism very well — Kiruba Shankar in particular deserves mention — and have graciously allowed “outsiders” to take over content planning, which Dina Mehta, Neha Viswanathan and Peter Griffin have done.

The event still lacks focus. It’s not clear exactly what aspect of blogging is to be discussed, as “all of it” is too generic to mean much. I’m going to speak about the public nature of conversation on the web, but in the absence of anyone else covering a related topic, I’ll have to cover a large breadth and sacrifice depth, as will several others. Thankfully, it appears that sufficiently large numbers of thoughtful and articulate people are planning to attend, so that alone should make up for it.

If you are attending, see you in Chennai tomorrow.

Some folks are planning a blogging BarCamp in September. While I’m sceptical of an event that bills itself as “INDIA’S BIGGEST & THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE blog event” (emphasis theirs) rather than describe why or to whom it is relevant (ie, smells of a mutual admiration society), who knows what it’ll turn into? Here’s the BlogCamp website, wiki, attendee map and oops, no mailing list. Guess you’re supposed to discuss via blogs.

Come on guys, blogging is mainstream now. This is like having a conference on… wait for it… Instant Messaging! Everyone from that startup planning to revolutionise inter-cubicle communications to your teenage sister’s high school C section third bench buddy list is target audience? You need more focus than that if you want enough people to get excited.

I’ve put myself in the “yeah, maybe… I’ll think about it” attendee list.