Blog Camps!

India's first Blog Unconference came to a gala end on September 10th. It was organized on a national scale, with bloggers pouring in from practically every corner of the country for 2 days. Bloggers from New Delhi, Mumbai and Calcutta had come in, just for this. And it was every bit the melting-pot of ideas it had promised to be.

We had bloggers talking about regional blogging - blogging in the Indian languages, a very pertinent topic, and one that, as a part of an organization involved with translations, especially interested me. A Bangla blogger might write 'Paper rat' on her blog, for example, and I, a reader, might think that she wanted to talk about Rats and Paper. But she might have wished to talk about 'Paaper Raat' - a Night of Sin! A problem that occurs because we use a Romanized script, instead of our own language.

Then there were bloggers like Amit Aggarwal and Rajesh Setty, Robert Scoble and Sharad Haksar, each of whom had their own stories to tell, about blogs and how it changed their lives. All in all, a very interesting affair.

- Pavithra Srinivasan