The barCamp 3 Mumbai experience

barCamp Mumbai 3 was a good experience. The team got good feedback from many barCamp participants. The interest and enthusiasm shown towards the bloozle concept was very encouraging.

We conducted two sessions: the first one was Short Tale of the Long Tail. Here we discussed the emergence of the long tail concept and its powerful implications. The bloozle concept goes hand in hand with it since we try to address the twin issues of relevancy and quality (in the Long Tail) to deliver the best of blogging and news content to our users.

Our second session was Unexplored Possibilities of Tagging. Here we elaborated on the idea of how a simple exercise like tagging content with some relevant words has potent applications. Tagging leads to powerful content delivery mechanisms like TagFeeds, GroupFeeds and SubFeeds. It might also enable the user to discover and meet people who are writing top quality articles on topics the user is interested in.

Coming to how the barCamp was for us - the best thing which happened to us was the T-shirts - they gave us visibility, recognition as a team and more importantly help build the brand bloozle at the barcamp. Among other things, Kalpesh (K) did a good job by sprinting to the wiki - our presentations were indeed the first to hit the Wiki. Anirudhha, Kalpesh (K & M) along with Aurko (all donning the T-shirt) did good campaigning outside the sessions.

Initially, we felt that we need to include bloozle in the demo session because it looked like demo sessions generated the most interest and were getting the maximum crowds. But as the day went by - we found that people were indeed interested in bloozle - in fact, lot of people kept on following up with us about when our presentations were scheduled (T-shirts helped again here by identifying us). And at the end our sessions were quite well attended.

One more thing which went well of course, was that the idea was understood by most of the people in the two sessions; some pertinent questions were obviously the ones related to the tagging spam, content spam etc.

Overall we think the barCamp was very successful for us in terms of

• visibility
• getting people interested in the concept
• making contact with various people, users and consultants who gave us a lot of input on usability, desirable features and the like. Such valuable feedback is always appreciated.

Our team found many presentations and demos at this barcamp praiseworthy. Barcamp as an unconference has really arrived and keeps improving upon itself year after year. We also found about 100 participants who agreed to be beta-testers to bloozle. Needless to say, we are fired up to make bloozle a useful and valuable service which will change the way we access information on the web.

Are you too interested in bloozling as a beta tester? Then Get invited to bloozle.