Ok, so I waited a whole week before posting anything on Barcamp Bangalore but I wanted to get all my thoughts organised before writing anything.

Let’s get started, shall we?

The Bad

Barcamp is supposed to be an unconference, and not an open conference. Theres a big difference between the two. While an open conference is a place where anyone can come and speak on whatever they want, an unconference is a more of platform for discussion. But I’ve heard more and more people calling for more “organised” Barcamp with fixed time slots and special speakers.

The Good

The best sessions in Barcamp were the ones outside the classrooms. The sessions on the durries, the random corridor meet-ups and discussions during lunch/coffee/smoke breaks. These sessions are what Barcamp should really be about. People were throwing ideas about, discussing new technologies they’ve used, and just talking about design, photography and other non-tech related issues.

The Ugly

Every event needs sponsors, and sponsors in return would like to see their banners, leaflets and other propaganda at the event location. That’s OK. Every event has sponsor’s banners hanging all over the place. But when an established company comes on the second day, books 3 sessions in a row, puts their banners and posters all over the venue and basically hijacks the camp, it just gets ugly.

Barcamps are the people, the discussions, the ideas. It is not a platform to sell services, market your latest product or make money. Hopefully the next Barcamps will focus on the above more.

I was watching TV the other day when I saw an ad for computer peripherals and cases. The ad was showcasing pretty regular, plasticky stuff that you’ll find in any Indian household PC along with pictures of hot models(apparently this sales technique still works for them). But then something in the ad caught me eye, behind a semi-desperate looking model. It looked familiar, almost too familiar, so I decided to go to the company’s site and check for myself and this is what I found.

This is the iBall Workhorse PC Cabinet. A plastic replica of Apple’s Mac Pro Case. You can check out the URL for yourself here:

http://iball.co.in/inner/show_product_details2.asp?catid=20&pid=10

And if you want to compare it to the original:

Apple Mac Pro

Comments?

I’ll be attending Barcamp Bangalore 6 this weekend (the 19th and 20th of April).

It’ll be see how different Barcamp Bangalore is from the other Barcamps I’ve attended and also because I’ve heard so much about Barcamps in Bangalore.

I’ve already booked a session and chosen to speak on “The Death of PR” so I’ll be seeing you there!

For the last few weeks I’ve been testing a number of blogging and CMS platforms to see which one fits my needs best.

I’ve tried:

• Wordpress
• Textpattern
• Joomla
• Drupal
• Mambo
• Mephisto
• Serendipty
• Expression Engine Core
• and a few more..

As some of you’ll may have guessed I’ve finally settled on Wordpress 2.5 for a couple of reasons

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I’ve yet to discover the all of intricacies of Wordpress and its functions. I hope to create my own theme in some time. For now I’m using Simplicity, a German based theme that I’ve customized for English content. It’s still got a few bugs that got lost in translation so feel free to leave a comment on them.