So Bar­Camp is offi­cially on here in Ban­ga­lore. I walked in at about 8.30 am and found a few peo­ple hard at work already. Quite a few peo­ple walked in around 9ish and I’d esti­mate around 50–60 peo­ple have arrived and I guess many more will be com­ing through dif­fer­ent stages of the morning… 

There are five spaces for the ses­sions and Jace has inno­v­a­tively named them Toddy, Arack, Narangi, Santra and Feni. I guess that should get folks started in high spirits! 

More as the ses­sions start.… 

To find other live blog­gers, check the Bar Camp page.

Pho­tos being uploaded here fre­quently.

10 Am: Atul Chit­nis on Mobile Com­put­ing and Pete Deeemer on the Art of Scrum

- The Art of Scrum is a project man­age­ment method­ol­ogy applied to soft­ware projects and has been used at Yahoo for the last one year. All teams around the world are imple­ment­ing it and sur­veys of the team revealed that 2/3 of teams feel they are more pro­duc­tive with this sys­tem. The method­ol­ogy uses what is called Sprint(cycles any­where between 1–4 weeks) and also con­ducts reg­u­lar reviews (includ­ing daily stand-up ses­sions with team mem­bers) in the prod­uct cycle. 

11 am: Tara Hunt of Riya.com talks about Pinko Marketing

The trend today is to go away from com­mer­cial mar­ket­ing to com­mons based marketing. 

What is com­mons based marketing?

- Build some­thing that’s amaz­ing and then let go
- Early adopters will use your prod­uct and pro­mote it for you (Flickr.com is a good exam­ple)
- Blog­gers will take it for­ward if it’s good and if it works for them, they can be an influ­en­tial com­mu­nity
- Instead of tak­ing it to the elite, go to the ama­teurs
- They are more valu­able, experts in their own way
- There is a sec­tion of pop­u­la­tion to be paid atten­tion to, this includes niche sec­tions
- The process should be highly par­tic­i­pa­tory, you stay out of the way and let the com­mu­nity take it (Bar­Camp is a good example)

As a marketer:

- Be a com­mu­nity advo­cate
- Go with the flow
- Pre­dict the future (needs/trends emerg­ing)
- Reward your com­mu­nity (incen­tives, know that their work is appre­ci­ated)
- Be your own client (if you don’t use it then oth­ers won’t)
- Let go (You can build a bet­ter fil­ter when you’re a part of the community)

11.30: Sathish & Jayanth

What do you do when you miss a class in school or college? 

Copy some­one else’s notes and try and catch up! Or fall behind in your class. Well, this new con­cept that has been sug­gested by Sathish and Jayanth is about pod­cast­ing in schools to cre­ate a stu­dent teacher community. 

So when­ever you miss a class, all you need to do is log in to a web­site and view a pod­cast of the ses­sion you missed! This could be a mix of audio/video podcasts. 

There are of course, many chal­lenges to this con­cept, includ­ing the fact that teach­ers today don’t have access to com­puter resources today. There is also the band­width issue that comes into play when you talk about mul­ti­casts or stream­ing audio/video. An inter­ac­tive ses­sion with the audi­ence is going on and throw­ing up more per­spec­tives on the idea. 

More on: Pod­shaala

12.00 noon: Arjun Ram & Arun Ram on Taazza.com

How news has evolved over the years in terms of report­ing and delivery…

On the scene today are CNN (360 degree view of the world), Google News (News aggre­ga­tion), NewsVine (Social News), Mem­o­ran­dum (Meme Tracker).

The Indian con­text: Where are the local boys? 

Some sites which offer news aggre­ga­tion are Samachar.com (news links), New­sHound (News aggre­ga­tion)
and Indian news sites (RSS adoption).

But where is the real innovation?

That is where Taazza comes in : offer­ing fea­tures like meme track­ing, ‘insta’ news mash-up, loca­tion based news, ‘meme’ dig­ging. News should be avail­able with min­i­mum fuss and effort and that is what this news aggre­ga­tor is all about. 

Some of the dif­fer­en­tia­tors of the ser­vice include the abil­ity to catch up news sto­ries for a spec­i­fied time win­dow. News sto­ries are also inte­grated with tools like Wikipedia, Flickr.com & Google Maps. 

For exam­ple, if you’re read­ing news about the the bird flu, you can at the same time get related related arti­cles on Wikipedia. The objec­tive is to get a news foun­da­tion but also inte­grate with other tools. 

Arjun pro­ceeds with a live demo. What you can expect from the Taazza team: News Pod­casts, Indian Blog track­ing, Tea Kadai (News river) and APIs RSS & JSON. 

Visit Taazza
Taazza Review

1.00 pm: Ram Narayan from Adobe : Rich Text Appli­ca­tions and FLEX

These days every­body seems to take advan­tage of AJAX and jump into web 2.0 in any way they can. Why should Adobe be left behind and whats bet­ter they have incor­po­rated the tech­nol­ogy within their trade­mark flash tech­nol­ogy. They have come up with a prod­uct called FLEX which is basi­cally a flash based MXML tag library. Their library is quite large and the demo was quite impres­sive. It did seem a bit pro­pri­etary but it remains to be seen as to how well this tech­nol­ogy inte­grates with your nor­mal html based AJAX applications.

12.45 : Chris, Tara, Alex, Jay
Chris talks about how Bar­Camp started… 

How Bar Camp started, a lit­tle about the his­tory. Why pay thou­sands of dol­lars to attend a con­fer­ence, they asked? They had no money and no venue and came up with the first Bar­Camp in 6 days! Every­thing was then doc­u­mented in a Wiki for every­one to share and learn from. From there it has spread and today Bar­Camps have pro­lif­er­ated all over the world. In India, Delhi, Chen­nai and Hyder­abad have had Bar­Camps with Ban­ga­lore fol­low­ing and Mum­bai in the pipeline. Amit Ran­jan talks about his Delhi Bar­Camp experience.

There is a dis­cus­sion about the spirit of the Bar­Camp, the diverse back­grounds of peo­ple attend­ing, local flavours in depend­ing on cities (Delhi had peo­ple of entre­pre­neur back­grounds while Ban­ga­lore has a large devel­oper com­mu­nity as participants. 

2 pm: 1clickblog.com: Mobile Pho­to­blog­ging, Anuj Khu­rana

A talk on a ser­vice that pro­vides the sync between mobile and web con­tent. 1clickblog lets you instantly pub­lish pho­tos from your smart­phone to an online photo album (pho­to­blog) to share with oth­ers. You will of course need a phone with a data con­nec­tion. It offers fea­tures like tags, titles etc. And also allows cross-posting to mul­ti­ple blogs. They are look­ing at the ser­vice as a ‘dig­i­tal lifestyle organ­iser’. While many com­mu­ni­ties oper­ated as silos, today there is an increased cross-linking between them and this is a fea­ture that 1clickblog incor­po­rates. Check out their web­site.

Other ses­sions going on:
Ama­zon Web Ser­vices, Nilesh
Art of Scal­ing : Dev­das Bhagat

2.30 pm: Man­ag­ing a Live­Jour­nal Com­mu­nity, Jace and Nis­hant

Some of the stuff being discussed:

The chal­lenges, high and low points of man­ag­ing a com­mu­nity online.
Some inter­est­ing expe­ri­ences and inci­dents.
What about flame wars?
The role of the mod­er­a­tor? When does he/she step in?
How much mod­er­a­tion is required?

Jace says that a com­mu­nity is defined by its cri­sis points. It’s these kind of inci­dents that bring the com­mu­nity together (or against!) and also cre­ates spikes in traf­fic. A com­mu­nity would be dead with­out cri­sises. At the same time, they can get unpleas­ant and nasty. The dis­cus­sion took dif­fer­ent cases over a period of time and how the com­mu­nity sur­vived and han­dles these inci­dents. You can read more about it here.

3.00 pm: Inde­pen­dent Music, Infinitymag.com, Shreyas

This ses­sion was about cre­at­ing a com­mu­nity or forum for Indian musi­cians to reach out and share/publicize their music. As of now, they’ve got an Inter­net radio web­site, play­ing from a col­lec­tion of 200 odd songs. The guys who’ve started this aren’t really sure about how to take it to masses given lim­ited time away from their day jobs. So, the ses­sion was all about invit­ing thoughts/ideas from the audi­ence for them to make this successful. 

4.00 pm: Light­ning talks going on. Amit Ran­jan on har­ness­ing the power of blogs, a gen­tle­man I couldn’t iden­tify on street per­for­mance pro­to­col. Other ses­sions going on are Micro For­mats (Chris Mess­ing). and Sumeet on Write Web, Infor­ma­tion Over­load (Man­ish J)…

5 pm: IP laws and issues relat­ing to copy­right, patents etc.

Devesh Bha­gat: Closed source soft­ware is a trade secret. It’s patented, can­not be cloned. It does not go into the pub­lic domain. It is copy­righted also. We get into DRM issues. Fraud being con­ducted by indus­tries. Priv­i­leges are being abused. Ques­tions that have come up: who decided to give them these priv­i­leges? Why is not being revoked? Who is respon­si­ble? Pol­i­tics behind it being revoked? 

OVER AND OUT
The last ses­sion has ended and we’re all wind­ing up. Post­ing pics and to our blogs. Some folks have left. Some of us are mak­ing plans on what to do next… 

IMAGES FROM BARCAMP

More pho­tos