I was at the Bangalore Barcamp today and it was great fun.
The whole event was very well organized, kudos to Jessica, Jace, Manish, Muthu and others and irresepective of all the gibberish which has been happenning on the mailing list, the event by itself was sane and fun.
I first attended a talk by Tara from Riya.com about Pinko Marketing which is basically a set of guidelines to make your venture popular using modern day paradigms like blogging and community interaction etc. There was a healthy discussion at the end of it, mostly on how its easy to get opinion but difficult to get good opinion. Anyway we walked away having thought about a little more, so that solves the purpose anyway.
Then was the talk about Tazzaa.com which is basically a news aggregation site which suits local needs. I think most people would know that anything which solves local issues is rather close to my heart. A lot of people seem to be solving issues which are niche to foreign users but hardly look at the plethora of problems which need to be solved locally. I think tazza has a head start in this feild, their site had good ajax’ified UI, very intutive and beautiful google map integration ( which seems to be a norm these days ). Also what i really liked was the nice way to co-relate world occurences with locations. For instance if you search for “Fat guy wins a million dollars”, then you would get a map which shows locations of all fat guys who have won a million, heh i know thats a slightly weird way of looking at it but it shows patterns and patterns interest me. Overall they look a good prospect and hopefully the beta should be out soon, so that i can see something working on my browser instead of the presenters. Also they seem to be working on some kind of news genome project which is vaguely like Music Genome Project which understands what i need and gives me other news which would suit my taste. They also plan to push out api’s which mean you can show the latest news on your site instantaneously, the direction they are moving in seems to be pretty good. One thing i would like them to do is to have a easy way of users publishing news onto the site as in content genrated by the readers, this could make a mash of popular content v/s very niche local content. Like for instance i would love if i read the news like “Chief Minister inspecting roads near Airport, expect a traffic jam”, if this could filter through from people at the scene on to the top of the list then that would just kick ass! Lets hope that soon i dont have to go through 10 different rss feeds to get the local news i am looking for
Here is a sneek peek if all that description made you very curious.
After this we had a group discussion about Barcamp itself which manifested mostly as an experience sharing session. We broke for lunch after that.
I am going to write about the rest of the sessions later, Just slept 2 hours yesterday, I need sleep 🙂