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 A few days back, I blogged about the first Wordcamp being organised in India at Delhi at ADOBE India’s office at NOIDA.

Well I could not attend the first day of the event as I had exams going on im my $hitty college (more on my college coming soon) but I was fortunate enough to attend the second day of the event. And what an expirience it was. 

The day started with me reaching the venue, Adobe office, NOIDA just 5-7 mins before event was scheduled to kick of. And just when i was tweeing my status, i met a guy whom i met earlier this month at twestival. Then we moved along and went inside the hall where along with other who were present. The event dint start which gave me enough time to configure and connect my SE P1i to wi-fi connetion
provided by Adobe which later proved all important as I was able to tweet live updates and pics.

Soon we began (already late) with Priyanka (aka twilightfairy), one of the main organisers, delivering the welcome address and also apologising for the delay. The fist session was by Ankesh Kothari on “Turning your WP blog into a business”.

It was followed by the best session of the day by Mr. Pavan Duggal who is a advocate in hon’ Supreme Court of India, speaking on “Copyright and Intellectual Proprty Rights”. We knew it would be an interesting interactive session as it is a topic of high importance given that bloggers need to know their rights and limits so as to help better deal with plagriasm, but little did we have the idea of how rocking it was going to be. He started off with the recent Noida MMS and then got entangled in some serious debate and discussions with the wordcampers who were shooting questions one after the another at him,and he never ducked a question,satisfied every soul which had a question on his/her mind. Questions were varied and covered almost every aspect of online world. 

Pavan Duggal on copyrights and IPR

Next was Aditya speaking on WordPress and AIR.He said the Adobe AIR app TweetDeck (for twitter) is a mess and uses a lot of resources.(thats true BTW). He also almost started a browser war.

Then we had a snack break and then came a great opportunity to meet Amit Agarwal. He was talking to a few guys (everybody wanted a piece of him). When i got a chance I shook hands with him. Then i talked to him about a few things including his Adsense earnings. He said he earns money sufficient enough to help him lead a confortable life. He says he drives an SUV and he is happy with it. When i asked if its $x,xxx or $xx,xxx /day, he says its not above $10,000 which makes me believe he bags something in higher four digit figure. (though i still believe he is atleast in lower five digits/day,he just dint disclose it ). I asked Ashish to click me a photo with Amit.

Me with Amit Agarwal (labnol.org) dream come true!

Then we had lunch and food was good.

Then we went in while there was another session was about to start on Adobe. I left in between as we planned a tweetup with wordcampers while tweeting live. hehe. I met abhishek,Ashok (of ewebguru), Rohit Khurana, and a few others too. Whilw the disscussion was still on,i dint realise it was time for session on “writing wordpress plugins” as i was very keen to attend so as to get started with it and have a little background info. Anyway,bad luck there.
We were also asked to write down a few suggestions for Matt on what we would like to see added to wordpress in future releases and Matt would pick one as the best and give a prize to the person. And as i was outside at mini tweetup,i missed that too.
Matt actually read all the comments/suggestions and said he really liked the handwritten comments and will take them back home.

Matt Mullenweg reading suggestions given by wordcampers

After that came the guy himself, Matt Mullenweg holding a session on wordpress.tv. He also talked about how “taxonomy” works.
About Matt,he is a very funny guy. He kept cracking up witty one-liners which made every one present there a fan of him. He is very humble,always smiling and very attentive to whatever whoever had to say (which was a lot,given the kind of celebrity status he enjoys in blogging community). He is a good listener. He was very cool about all of bugging him for getting pics with him.Infact, i had 3 photographs with him ( yay).

Me with Matt. Mission accomplished!

Whatsmore,I even asked him to click a photo for me from my SE P1i as i knew he is a good photographer. I asked him to click a random picture and this is what he came up with:

pic clicked by Matt from my SE P1i at wordcampindia

 I also thanked him for giving an awesome platform like wordpress and making our lives easy. I questioned Matt how much in advance he and his team thinks for new features to be incorporated in future wordpress releases and whether v 2.x.x and v 3.x.x will be hugely different? He said, he usually plan two releases in advance and every release is a big release and its not like 3.x.x will be hugely different from 2.x.x He said for them, 2.6 to 2.7 was a huge upgrade (it really was, v 2.7 is just awesome)

Anyway,we also saw a great panel discussion on “Will blogs replace mainstream media-India v/s US perspective” The panelists were (in pic from left to right) Mr Sanjay, Mr N Madhavan (Associate editor- Hindustan Times),Om Malik , and Matt. They laid down some intersting points and arguements,specially Madhavan and Om. Frankly speaking Matt was not looking as if he was enjoying the session (may he had a flight and wanted to get it over soon).
The last was the star of the day, Mr Pavan Duggal again on Indian IT act. Needless to say it was amazing too.
Then the winners of the feature suggestion contest were announced and the prizes were water calculator, colour changing coffee mug, torch set in that order for 1st, 2nd, 3rd prize. Matt and Om gave away the prizes and also other gifts to speakers. There was a lucky draw too (for wordcamp attendees) which had two prizes of 1 domain with 1 year hosting.
With that and a signing off note by Priyanka and Matt, the first ever wordcamp of India came to an end.
It was such huge success. people are still talking about it on the net. #wci was trending on twitter for both the days it was live. And I was one of the trend setters too!

As much as I loved the second day,I still regret to not be able to make it to the first day as first day had sessions by Matt (the founder of WordPress,the world’s most famous blogging platform),Om Malik(of GigaOm),Amit Agarwal (of labnol / Digital Inspiration)

I hope wordcamp India is back again next year with even more awesomeness. Congratulations and thanks to all the organisers Mayank Gupta,Priyanka,Sanjay,Abhishek,Delhi bloggers bloc for giving us such an opportunity! Hope you guys will be back next year with wordcampindia delhi 2010!

Here are few more pics:(click on images to see them full size)

attendees at wordcampindia before the event began

(anticlockwise) Me with Pavan Duggal,Matt and Om

Matt and Om working on their laptops talking to Priyanka and Mayank

More pics at my Flickr photostream 

P.S. If i mentioned your name and dint link to your site/blog,drop me a mesage with your blog name. If i dint mention your name and we met at wordcamp,drop me a message and ill include your name with your blog/site as well.