Chennai BlogCamp 2006 - A Report

PutVote is a useless site. It has been hijacked by some jobless people who think they are going to change the world. If you write badly about another blogger it will definitely make it to PutVote.

It's got a slick, goofy interface, although I'm not a fan of anonymous voting, and what seems to be randomized vote counts

Unconference? Beach party? Well, well! Which one did you attend, K?
;)

People, we hear you. I hate being hijacked as much as you do. Stay put, and we're planning to improve the community aspects in drastic ways.

Kishore: I agree that we're just another bookmarking site. However, I think we have a higher sense of community than any other "social" bookmarking site. And I think that the community itself is the key differentiator for "social" websites.

Kishore, I heard Carney was booted out of the country. Any new information available?

And BTW great recap;)

Kingsley,
The only posts which make it to the top are from a set of 10 bloggers who vote regularly on Putvote. Other than this, people who write posts about Putvote are also featured extensively.
Although we like the concept, the rest of us don't want to join as we don't feel a part of the community. Given the way Putvote is going, it is better to call it Pukevote.

BottleMani, gaming the system is part of the nature of social media, as pointed out recently, there is no perfect answer yet, but it's not unusual for a cabal to rule purely because they put in the effort at voting and submitting stories.

I visited putvote after seeing it mentioned on Desipundit, but was put off by the "geocities" look of it. It was as if some 15 yr old kid did it with frontpage.

When I visited, most of the top stories were those making fun of other bloggers. Then there were links to very short useless posts (for example: somebody being bored) This is not the kind of content I expected. The site also had the same 10 people commenting and some people were commenting in tamil, not english. It looked like a site for these people only, not for the general public.

Sridhar,
You are right. Putvote links to its founders (two guys), Nilu, Krish and some more useless jokers. Most of the posts are meaningless but they somehow make it to the top. I have never seen a good post at the top.

carney is still there...he didnt mention no threat

kishore:

good recap

got a sense that it was a bit of a yawner ... but the first ones usually are... the subsequents ones would be better (lessons learned - added insight etc.)

carney hinted at 'visa' issues...said he had to leave but would return

Barcamps, blogcamps seem to be heading for utter failure in India.

A Indian Bloggers popularity is a function of how average his/her writings are (so that a lot of people agree with him/her) and hence the hits.

Some of the popular Indian blogs are the ones which just pick a current topic from newspaper and add a bit here and there.

Indian Intellectuals are still a long way from challenging and experimenting with mindsets, diversity, open mindedness and originality.

Then, there are also sycophancy, hypocrisy, publicity hunting factors.

Do not these Indian barcamps and blogcamps look like some copied western tunes by Indian musicians?

I was worried at one point about the amount of fighting going on at putvote. but i would not dismiss the site because of this.
i have visited the site over the last month and have bookmarked and voted for sites over there. i must say i have read some fantastic blogs at putvote.
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aaman, like prabhu(ferrari) explains in a recent post, the voting is not random. each anonymous voter gets 3 votes and a logged in voter gets 10. sounds fair enough.
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>Sumanth: Do not these Indian barcamps and blogcamps look like some copied western tunes by Indian musicians?<
You are right. sometimes they take on that hue. but these camps cannot be dismissed a total failure: sometimes the content sucks, an aspect of organising is sad, a question is stupid. but look at the sheer amount of interesting people you get to meet. from the ordinary to the accomplished, they were all there.
and the discussions had their moments too. i was there and i learned quite a bit. i would like you to come there next year and share ur thoughts, voice ur criticism, and most importantly do your bit to improve the event.

If anonymous voting is allowed, any halfway competent programmer could write a perl script to switch IP addresses and drive up votes, and why not 'one click one vote'?

Blogcamps, etc are very very important in fostering growth and creativity. There are always a greater percentage of gawkers, listeners and non-entrepreneurs, but that's the same everywhere. The entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs get to connect, and fruitful discussions like Nandhu mentions are the outcome. What's this Indian vs non-Indian attitude? Doesn't make sense in the Flat World

Aaman,
>> Doesn't make sense in the Flat World

*wink* You said it! :)

i didnt know that this was what u meant, aaman, when u were talking all this while about gaming the system.

God recount of events, Kishore. Beach party sounded exciting. Hope the blogcamp cathces on and gets better next year.

IndianPad just disabled anonymous voting, thankfully

the beach party was fantastic. all the bloggers were made to confess their first crushes. everybody was drunk and the moon was out and the water was a silverly glimmer. fantastic.

how was the action?;)

Aaman: On the subject of the perl script - vote again stuff, I didn't know about switching IPs, (or that it could be easily managed), it occured to me too.

But if you look between the name-calling and blogger-bashing, there are some good links around. And I don't want to dump PutVote site owing to this.

Absolutely - innovation is important, especially in the nascent desi web 2.0 scene - you'll always have sh*t-dumpers, wade through it, and move to the next level. You should see what digg is going through nowadays.

Social media is where it's at!