Blog Camp Kerala 2008-An amazing, unforgettable experience!

The first ever Blogger (Un) Conference on a Houseboat was held at Alappuzha on Saturday, the 16th of August 2008. The program was delayed by half an hour and started off by 10.30 as the houseboat arrived late after a previous night trip. I was very enthusiastic to see that almost all the confirmed participant's were there to board the boat. Except for a few of us in the early forty's and the early sixties almost all of them were very young from the I.T field and bubbling with energy. Their enthusiasm was the much needed catalyst to fire us all up. The meet was an informal one and the houseboat was sponsored by the Kerala Tourism department. Some of the other sponsor's were Oktatabyebye, IT's Life, Indiblogger, Mindmeister and Amvizone.
The program kicked off with self introductions and immediately the talks/discussions on some very interesting topics followed. The first one to talk was the French-Canadian Guillaume Marceau on the consequences of relentlessly hammering on the keyboard. His own wrist was permanently damaged by RSI and he had to leave a lucrative programming job for a teaching post at IITKM. He had his wrist and hand tied up in some sort of protective gear. He spoke on the advantages of using a speech recognition software like the "Dragon Naturally Speaking" in such circumstances.The next to follow was a very interesting and informative talk on Search Engine Optimisation techniques by Mani Karthik. Karthik spoke vastly on the methods of optimising a blog to earn a living out of it! The next talk was a very passionate one by Sridhar who has started Karnataka Election Watch, a blog which deals with citizen empowerment and assistance in knowing the politicians that we elect and send to the highest offices of power. It was a very relevant topic and I enjoyed every bit of it. By 1.45 P.M we had a long break and were treated to a sumptuous heavy lunch with karimeen fry, kappa, meen curry, chicken fry rice, sambar, thoran, pickle followed by semiya payasam. After lunch I talked about Audio Blogging, basic requirements; both hardware and software for recording a song and also did a demonstration on recording techniques.
Chandrasekharan Nair or the Kerala Farmer was the next one to follow with a talk on Rubber Board Statistics and how he had discovered errors and malpractices in many of their records and efforts he had taken to bring them to light. It was amazing to see the energy and enthusiasm displayed by this 60 year old who disclosed that he was only an S.S.L.C. But in spite of not being educated in the way the world sees, he endeared himself to the audience with his command on what he talked about. The program ended up with a talk on Campus Blogging by Kenny, one of the main organisers of the camp. Kudos to the young team of Kenney, Anand, Aravind and Jaleel who did a fabulous job of organising the event. I should say that guys, you really rocked! Hope we have more such Blog Camps in the future.

Some more links to the event:

http://www.hindu.com/2008/08/17/stories/2008081753540300.htm
http://teck.in/blogcamp-kerala-reviewing-the-unconference.html
http://blog.technoparktoday.com/2008/08/blogcampkerala-was-a-huge-success/
http://www.manikarthik.com/kerala-blogcamp-id-love-to-be-there-next-time/