Wordcamp India Day 1 Sessions Review

Wordcamp India – Adobe, Noida Day 1 ended and here is the review from my side on it.
Ok so it was a cool day meeting many online friends like Abhishek, Abhinav, Abhijeet, Gaurav, Ashish, Shashank, and talked with many others and especially was happy when i Shook hands with Matt Mullenweg. It was a joyous and informative day with a couple of the presentations being very informative and a few funny. I had live blogged the entire event today except the last part.

Here were a few of the presentations and sessions that i fully attended -
- Reached in the morning a bit late when Om Malik was delivering the keynote. Could not catch up with what he was speaking.. from the middle of his session. So that went totally out.

- Then it was Shreyas talking about “Using WordPress to implement a Radio Site” and it was a good explanation of how they went from very basic website 5 years back to now a powerful and good radio site which is totally powered by WordPress. It would not be liked by everyone but who were in search of some innovative ideas to use WordPress, this is one of the ideas.

- Then it was Abhijeet Mukherjee who talked on how to get started after installing wordpress. And this was a long session which explained every A-Z of things that has to be done after you install wordpress. It was not for those who already know the basic things, but was for people who came to learn every small thing about WordPress. And it really was worth watching, as Abhijeet explained every part clearly and did it pretty well till the end.

- “State of the word” by Matt Mullenweg – Now this was one of the reasons i went to Wordcamp, and how can i expect this to be a boring one? Matt got really well involved into things and he was awesome all of the time when he was on the stage. He was really happy to see that the number of wordcampers who use WordPress is so high, and the way people were interacting during the session, Matt said “U guys are pretty Hip” after getting impressed with all of us
He also said that people at Germany just used to keep Silent for every question he asked, but you guys are just very good and answering well.
He talked much about State of WordPress, expectations with 2.8 version and what all the platform needs to have in future. It was one of the best and interesting sessions.

- After lunch, it was Abhinav Gulyani speaking on Implementation of SEO into WordPress. It was his first presentation on stage and he felt quite nervous, and funny enough to entertain the crowd with some cracky jokes all over, everyone on twitter had a great time commenting on his less prepared presentation and he was good enough to appreciate all the critics with a welcoming message, SEO topic was interesting and informative but it seemed like more of a funny presentation with not much discussion over SEO. May be, when you give chance to a new comer to be present on stage you can expect the same. Still, it was an interactive session as no one was sitting quite for the whole 45 minutes. He was quite of the entertaining person after Matt and Amit Agarwal in the conference.

- Then it was another Prolific blogger, Amit Agarwal talking about “Optimizing Google Ads On Your WordPress Blog + AdSense Alternatives” and this was a totally informative and good talk by Amit. He explained pretty good things that many people were not knowing and so everyone appreciated it very much. He explained what ad formats are the best, what is Section targeting and Placement targeting. How to use Analytics with Adsense, and also how Image search from Google also helps you earn good revenue with adsense. Would take separately about this later.

- A small quiz about WordPress and the web, organized by Ankur Banerjee. Questions were good and i would post the entire list of questions in one of the next posts when time permits me.

- And after this, i left the venue and there was an open discussion between the Attendees, Matt and Om Malik. Everyone said it was good.. and that was it for Day 1.

Overall, i enjoyed the day as i met many people with whom am chatting since months and never met directly. All the guys were cool and good.