also listing all of them here in order reduce pain of clicking the link

list of topics i can contribute to or discuss about

* Peek into wordpress plugin development (basic intro) based on My profiles plugin(still under development)
* Wordpress customization tips including (speed enhancement)
* Changing world of internet with web 2.0 / 3.0 and its importance to us. (intro to web 2.0 for those new to this concept)
* A peek into the world of blogging clients. I am talking about clients not servers. (ex scribefire or bleezer or flock)
* Why i still blog even though i am also lot more then just active @ twitter, orkut, facebook or what not.

Thanks for dropping by, and yes, would’ve been good if you had been there. Do you know where and how I came to know about this blog camp? On Twitter!

Thank you for your elaborate and in-depth comment on the blog camp phenomenon. It was really a phenomenon as much online as well as actually in the camp!

Unlike you, I’m not deeply puzzled. Bloggers are not the average Joes and Janes of society. Bloggers are at least one or more of the following – independent-minded, creative, wanting to have their say, entrepreneurs, socialites, iconoclasts, geeks, loners, marketers. Given that this represents a fragment of the general population, and a fragment that comprises of such extremes, it is hardly surprising what would happen if they decide to get together.

I see in your thoughts as well as Dhananjay’s the desire that a blogcamp reflect this diversity with multiple session-tracks. If a certain type of bloggers make the camp focus only on one blogging theme, it would make you feel uneasy and you would be disappointed.

I share your desire, but not your optimism. I am a bit cynical but that doesn’t mean I am not open to being corrected. I would love to attend a camp where folks like you, me, and Dhananjay are presenting about serious blogging in one track, marketing-SEO folks are presenting in another track, personal/musings/dreams/fantasy folks in another and so on. I think organizing such a camp would be a challenge, especially given the fact that the resources required to organize such an event are more naturally gathered by marketing/SEO kind of entrepreneurs. I would not be surprised to learn that marketing/SEO sessions were primary focus of most Indian blog camps. Are the other kinds of bloggers willing to invest the time, effort, and resources to organize a blog camp that does not adhere to generally accepted guidelines of such unconferences and camps? That, to me, is the million-dollar question in this respect, and as of now, I do not have an answer.

Hope my post gave you at least some idea of what happens at a blog camp. I was conscious not to be presumptive about them, and hence overcame my gut feel that was the same as yours – that they would simply be socializing events. I realized if I assumed them to be, I wouldn’t be open-minded. I had to experience at least one camp to form an opinion.

I would say every camp would be unique. From some of the comments I’ve seen from people who have attended camps in Mumbai, Bangalore, etc., it seems SEO/Marketing always has a strong focus and a certain set of popular bloggers always seem to hog the limelight. I would therefore advise to know in advance who is coming and whom you’re interested in meeting, and meeting them one-on-one. That’s what I did and that helped.

The comment regarding elite bloggers was a veiled jab at those who look at blogs as a vehicle for getting traffic and earning money, not as a vehicle for meaningful interaction and discussion. Today, I find myself in between two extremes – my blogger friends who are not on Twitter on one hand, and others only using Twitter and neglecting their blogs altogether. I sincerely believe both forms of discovery, communication, information sharing, and making friends, have their unique advantages, and in fact can complement each other very well, as I seem to be finding in my experience. Some advantages of being on Twitter while being a blogger that come to mind at once are:

- Tweets about your posts with appropriate hash-tags reach a much wider audience, as well as a focused audience, who are interested in what you blogged about. For example, when I blogged about different films in my films meme, some people with thousands of followers on Twitter picked it up and re-tweeted it, potentially bringing many people to my posts who otherwise would not have discovered my blog at all.

- Twitter gives you a good idea of what people are talking about in real-time on the web. This can give you ideas about relevant things to blog about.

- If I stick to having discussions on blog posts, I have to visit multiple blogs in my browser to read updates to the conversation. When using a Twitter client like Tweetdeck, I have multiple conversations with multiple people at the same time without even having to switch between tabs. For example, there are a few people you will see on this blog with whom I have had multiple conversations on Twitter, much more than on this or their blog. There are a few people you will not see on this blog, with whom I’ve had multiple conversations on Twitter.

- Not every topic is worthy of a blog post. That’s the reason micro-blogging has become so popular.

- If I’m reading something you might like, or that is relevant to a post of yours, it is much easier for me to tweet you about it, rather than visiting your blog, adding a comment, and then inserting that link to what I was reading. If you’re not on Twitter, I’m likely to simply pass it up, and not visit your blog, and not share it with you. Who is the loser in this situation?

To exaggerate a bit, if you’re blogging to make friends on the Internet, then forcing visitors to get in touch with you via your blog comments section is like asking your friends to visit your home if they want to interact with you. Not being on twitter is akin to not having a phone where your friends can simply ring you up.

Looks like this comment could have been a blog post in itself! So I’ll stop here.