Kolkata blogger meet 2009 – K Bloggers on steroids on THAT day

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Wonderful evening, great crowd, well organized, good food, good talks, good networking thats it, thats all about Kolkata bloggers meet 2009. If anyone dared to summarized the whole evening like this then either the person has been dragged in to this meet without self permission or is probably out of his mind. Damn, it was a powerful evening, full of energy, as if all were on steroids.

Since many have already covered the whole event and its sequence at http://webreps.in/, let me cover what one can learn from such meets (Except the facts that “Network > Net work > work” & “Whom you know is as important or more important than what you know“) and what I expect the next step to be.

PPT and video from Kolkata blogger meet 2009

12 simple & practical ways you can improve your blogs from user’s point of view View more presentations from ajinimc.

(I am trying to upload the whole video, youtube did not work well, so trying on vimeo)

1. Presentation is also available at slideshare.net/ajinimc/
2. Follow me on twitter http://twitter.com/ajinimc
3. Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/web.marketing.expert ( I am there on orkut and almost all social media, do let me know the ones you prefer)

Background of Webreps

Not many may know how this webreps came to existence. I will give a lot of credit to Kamanashish (from what I know) for his burning desire and initial spark to organize such an event. If you think this happened in 12 days then probably you are hypnotized by the same guy. It happened over many many years. I remember the last bloggers meet arranged by Indibloggers, where Kamanashish shared the same desire of organizing bigger events in Kolkata. Years passed by but he kept his desire and hope of organizing one such event.

You got to congratulate yourself if you have great friends. And there came the whole Army of like minded, energetic, (and hell bachelors), who formed a team called webreps. Anirudh, Kamanashish, Saikat, Shimul and a bunch of others (Sorry if I missed someone), you know you did a good job, take pride in what you guys have achieved.

Kolkata became silicon valley on THAT DAY

I am not that optimistic to believe that “Kolkata can become Silicon valley in next 10 to 20 years” but still on THAT day, we saw the web silicon valley in making. Quoting from one of the great articles by Paul Graham on “how to be silicon valley”:

Could you reproduce Silicon Valley elsewhere, or is there something unique about it?

It wouldn’t be surprising if it were hard to reproduce in other countries, because you couldn’t reproduce it in most of the US either. What does it take to make a silicon valley even here?

What it takes is the right people. If you could get the right ten thousand people to move from Silicon Valley to Buffalo, Buffalo would become Silicon Valley.

That’s a striking departure from the past. Up till a couple decades ago, geography was destiny for cities. All great cities were located on waterways, because cities made money by trade, and water was the only economical way to ship.

Now you could make a great city anywhere, if you could get the right people to move there. So the question of how to make a silicon valley becomes: who are the right people, and how do you get them to move?

Two Types

I think you only need two kinds of people to create a technology hub: rich people and nerds. They’re the limiting reagents in the reaction that produces startups, because they’re the only ones present when startups get started. Everyone else will move.

On THAT DAY, we saw the nerds (who can be better nerds than bloggers, who still spend hours and hours on studies to excel) and RICH guys (Thanks to Abhishek Rungta). On behalf of the whole Kolkata blogger community please accept our thanks. Once SFC starts making money, we will surely jump into the pool to encourage such activities. Abhishek, you have all our blessings (I found him as a great human being, it was really nice talking to him. I was happy to see web company CEOs representing their companies and India on the global map, do let us know if we can be of any help).

Continuing with the history, when the geeks (Whole webreps team) met the Rich guy (Abhishek), they got even more encouraged and motivated to give it a go. The burning desire, the team support, finance & THEN THE REAL DIRTY work of arranging it. All happened and happened really well.

Lessons you can learn from Kolkata bloggers meet 2009, webreps

(as usual I will put up in points)

1. From history: One spark is enough for a fire. A good team of friends can make a lot of things happen. There is hard work involve. Once you dream, many more things will be added to it.
2. There is no age bar for blogging .
3. You should always be prepared with an elevator pitch. (Whats your elevator pitch for the next surprise meet)
4. From Abhishek’s presentation: How blogs can add to your top line. Never make a blog to earn money but to add value and the money will follow. (This sentence says a lot about web world. Did you know that when Google was created they were not sure of how to make money out of it? Twitter still doesn’t know how to make money out of it. It is about addressing a requirement and positioning your product there. There can be 1000s of ways to monetize it later)
5. From Vikas’s presentation: It was so so wonderful to listen to him after a long long time. He spoke about a new concept of priority access for Search engines. I too have some opinion about it and I will probably share it another blog post sometime later. It was great to have Vikas as a part of this meet.
6. From Arun Agarwal’s ppt: It was good. Reputation management helps and may be I will write a blog post about it. But it went a little too long I guess . According to me reputation management is all about getting to know what all is being said about you. It starts with having a unique name. In year 2003, I choosed AjiNIMC as nobody had it, so all the pages (over 13,000) that has AjiNIMC in it is relevant to me. Then comes the manageability, legal issues etc. It was great to hear a topic like reputation management on THAT day.
7. I missed Saptarshi’s presentation as was outside. I wanted to attend it. I have talked to many web marketing guys who claims to be experts. I like Saptarshi for the depth of knowledge and humility. Sorry buddy I missed your ppt.
8. About my presentation: Rajesh Rana is the guy who should get all the credit. He worked really hard to get this moving. As a policy at SFC, we wanted to do the best we could.

Where do I want to see these meets going

Getting more and more people involved and working towards social issues too. Like protesting against bandh’s, global warming etc as a unit. Even before thinking of a bigger event, I will think of improving smaller units (through web). Where we could discuss things on a regular basis. Cutting the cost for such meets by arranging it at someone’s house or office. I wish I had an office, I would have opened the office for it. We should meet every month and have a 5 hour meet.

Join us at http://groups.google.com/group/indian-blogosphere

http://groups.google.com/group/indian-blogosphere, we are planning to send one email per week with good blog posts by Indian bloggers and other related topics.

Other PPTs and Videos

Tags: blog, bloggers, kolkata, meet, webreps