I went along to Barcamp Dublin yesterday and as usually had a great day. The organisers Joe, Elly, Eoghan and Paul did a fantastic job. It was my first time in the Digital Exchange building, which provided an intimate atmosphere for the event. That was of course unless your talk was taking place in the main auditorium, however this room was perfect for the very popular talks like Darren Barefoot‘s as well as Eoghan‘s and of course the panel discussion.

The first talk I went to was by Conor Halpin of LeCayla. His talk focused on the pricing policies with SaaS. Conor perfectly demonstrated how not implementing the correct pricing policies from the start can be slightly restrictive as can be seen from the photo 🙂

One thing that I took from his talk was that getting good reliable reference sites is more important that making a profit from your initial customers. Once you have these reference customers on board, you reduce the risk exposure for further customer.

I managed to catch the end of Eoin O Dell‘s talk on bloging law. I will have to have a look at the full slides of the presentation to make sure I don’t breach any liable laws here. Although I should really start concentrating on posting more that once a month.

I was happy I caught Darren Barefoot’s talk on social media. He is a really entertaining guy and attracted a lot of audience participation. One thing I took from the talk was that for a blog to be successful it needs to be transparent and honest. I think that might be a barrier to entry for a lot of people. It is hard to hang out all of your washing for the entire internet to read.

I also went along to the GTD talk but might talk about the later as I have a lot to say on it. I think GTD might be exactly what I need at the moment. Recently I have found more and more weeks go by when I look back and think what have I actually done this week. I think it is time for a bit of time management. Needless to say I went and bought David Allens book to look into GTD further. This session conflicted with John Ward‘s presentation on Selling Web2.0 to Irish Financial Institutions. I was talking to Mark earlier in the day. He has done some great work with his company Cengal and gained a lot of caveats along the way. I was sorry that I missed it.

The panel discussion worked very well. I really enjoyed listening to Karlin Lillington of techno-culture. I sometimes find that there can be a few big ego’s floating around the blogosphere. It was refreshing to meet someone who it not solely concerned with getting their self a few more steps of the Technorati ladder of fame but genuinely enjoys blogging. She seemed to be just as happy to have 5 people really enjoy what she writes as have 5000 and all the fame.
I had to slip off after the panel session so apologies for missing the other sessions that followed.

Thank you for another great Barcamp.