Fourplay at BlogCamp Pune, News - City - Pune Mirror,Pune Mirror

By Akanksha Tyagi

Posted On Sunday, June 28, 2009 at 04:09:25 AM

A snapshot from BlogCampPune

Bloggers of all hues — serious ones, money people, funny guys, kid bloggers, techies, wannabe bloggers — gathered on Saturday for a camp that had a bit of everything.

Bloggers from Pune and Mumbai had serious and sometimes incomprehensible (to lay people) debates on how to monetise your blog, how to blog for a particular niche to learning from newspapers.

A lot of networking happened on the side and the whole session was capped off by a ‘marathon funnies session’ by Mumbai blogger Abhishek Thakkar.

Blogwall of Fame
Pune Mirror picked faces in the crowd that stood out. Here’s our pick of the stars of BlogCamp Pune

Tarun Chandel
The man behind getting the BlogCamp together, Chandel runs a blog and is one of the top 10 photobloggers ranked by alexa.com.

He has been the most regular attendee of the camps in India and abroad. Chandel works as a business analyst, but finds time to update his blog everyday.

What he thought of the response: ‘unorganiser’ Chandel said “Awesome, non-techies’ participation was a great experience in this camp.”

Abhishek Thakkar
For the uninitiated, Thakkar’s standup comic act on his blogging experience was unexpected. It started in the lobby, flowed into the room and went on for almost an hour during which he had the whole room in splits.

Thakkar said, “Humour is the best defense for all fat people and I also took it up. My story-telling moment was on December 23, ‘02 when I received a huge cheering from IIT Bombay guys in one of the annual fests.”

On his blogs, he said, “My blogs are in the cryo stage now, I can revive them whenever I wish to,” but said his only agenda for now was to “find a girl to marry”.

When asked about what ‘the’ moment for him was in this blogcamp, he said, “When you asked me if I could speak to you for 5 minutes.”

Dhananjay Nene
With a surfeit of discussions focussing on SEOs and hits and monetising, Nene expressed his displeasure at the fact that the focus was being taken away from creating quality content.

Nene’s is a voice that holds some serious weight in the blogging world with his blog on software architecture which has a worldwide audience.

This man has some really strong academic credentials too with an MBA from IIM (A) but for him the biggest compliment that he has ever got from blogging has been from someone who said that a post Nene wrote made it easier for the reader to understand that concept.

Farrhad A
From Mumbai, Farrhad was the youngest member of the blogcamp at 15. Blogging is one of the things Farrhad does, but one blog he runs gets 38,000 hits a month! Though he earns some money through blogging and has ideas to share on the same, he has sold some of his websites to earn more.

He is a star on Twitter too, with nearly 6,000 followers. If that were not enough, he scored 93 per cent in the ICSE Boards this year. He has also played state level chess and done international-level aeromodelling.