Final Thoughts on BlogCampSwitzerland2.0

The Bad and The Really Bad

• Abusing children to wear and sell political t-shirts. For Non-Swiss readers this might be complicated to understand. But if you follow the current discussions in Switzerland about politics, you might see that this is completely inappropriate
• The liveDemo were as bad as I expected. I haven’t seen one of them (I am consequent). But everybody I talked about said the presenters should at least have payed or sponsored something. I disagree. Block that! We don’t need that. This is no TechCrunch40.
• The location: I really, really, really hope this was the last time a Swiss BarCamp/BlogCamp event happened at the ETH in Zurich. They are way to expensive, they limit you in time and they don’t support you very much (in terms of press, price reductions or anything).
• Session slots: Out of the 20 available slots, only 16 were taken (I am not counting the liveDemo slots)
• Sponsoring was, let’s say, “light” this year. With only one sponsor and half of the money has to go to the venue, not very much is left. And I don’t think the organizers should pay for food, drinks or anything else.
• The “next” BlogCamp will be on August 29th, 2008 on “the day of information technology”. But IT != Blog. Why not a real BarCamp? The sessions about blogging are there anyway.
• And somehow I have the feeling some people participated as business people. Some non-bloggers were there to show on what they are working.

The Good

• Socializing part was top. Many new faces, many new ideas.
• Meet a lot old and new friends.
• This time it was more of a European BlogCamp. More bloggers from Germany and France.
• I think this was the highest percentage of women I have ever seen at a *Camp.
• Breakfast and Lunch, on site. Pretty cool and very tasty.
• The organization was again very good. And looks like Peter has learned something at the BarCampMunich 😉
• …

I can understand why many people didn’t show up. And sorry for not writing about the sessions I visited. But it was a BlogCamp. So you find many reports and posts via slug.ch or blogug.ch.