IBM Lotusphere 2009 – Orlando, FL – January 18 – 22 – Will You Be There?

I am still in Raleigh, NC, after having had one of the most productive workshops I can remember with my entire team as we got to prepare the various activities from our Social Software Programs and Enablement at IBM for 2009. Like I have said a few times already, there is nothing that would ever be able to substitute the face to face gathering of a relatively small group jamming together and putting together a plan to execute during a specific period of time. Nothing! Including the superb team building surrounding us all during the entire time and which have made these couple of days special! And highly recommended for anyone working on relatively small groups.

But life goes on and we are all on our way on to the next thing. And that, for half of my team, would be to head down tomorrow afternoon to Orlando, Florida, to attend what promises to be the IBM event of events for this year that I mentioned in a previous blog post. Yes, I am talking about the already impressive Lotusphere 2009 and it hasn’t even started yet!

Things have already kicked off with a huge amount of resources: blog posts, podcasts, twitterings, Facebook events, gatherings, etc. etc. and I have got a sense that this year, more than ever, it is going to be almost impossible to catch up with everything. So I thought I would go ahead and share a quick blog post over here pointing out a number of helpful resources that I think would be worth while following before, during and after the event. So let’s go!

• Lotusphere Agenda / Program: This is probably your starting point. Find out there what the event would be like, the sessions happening throughout next week, plus plenty more! Oh, and don’t forget to check out the agenda while on the move through the Notes DB (Put together by the Genii Software folks), the Blackberry version or the fine iPhone Web interface.
• Blogs: To start with, and like usual blogging is going to be  bigger than ever, I think! So I will just highlight a few interesting resources to keep up with everything happening: Google Blog Search, Technorati, Ed Brill‘s excellent blog which I am sure will be covering all of the important announcements coming up!, the Lotusphere Blog (Recently created and already containing loads of relevant info and links about the event), Chris Miller’s IdoNotes (Where, once again, he has done a tremendous piece of work sharing plenty of tidbits about the event itself and how to stay connected) and, of course, PlanetLotus (With perhaps the most comprehensive coverage of the entire event, since plenty of us will keep feeding it as time goes by).
• Facebook: With over 530 members already exchanging information and knowledge about the event itself.
• Twitter: Of course, we couldn’t have Lotusphere 2009 without Twitter, specially now that more and more folks have joined the conversations happening in real-time. A couple of places to watch out for: Lotusphere Twitter handle and Search Lotusphere. I will also be doing plenty of live tweeting at @elsuacon, but more on that later on…

I know that there are plenty more places to go and check out. But I think the ones I have mentioned above are the ones that will give you a little bit of a sense of some of the amazing things that will be taking place starting off tomorrow at Lotusphere 2009. However, if you feel there is another interesting and relevant resource to keep up with the event itself that I may be missing out on it, please feel free to drop a comment with the link to it and I will add it into the original blog post itself.

In another upcoming blog post I will be sharing with you folks what I will be up to during the entire week, so that if you would want to catch up face to face you know how you can get hold of me or where I will be hanging out.

For now though time to get ready for a lovely TweetUp event I will be participating in, here in Raleigh / Durham, NC, with a group of fellow IBM twitterers, plus a bunch of thought leaders in the Enterprise 2.0 space, like @gilliatt and @leewhite. If you want to come along, we will be at City Beverage in Durham, at 4pm EST and everyone is more than welcome to drop by, join us for a drink or two and have plenty of fun! See you there!

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Social Networks, Networking, Conversations, Dialogue, Connections, Relationships, Lotusphere, Lotusphere 2009, Lotusphere09, Events, Conference Events, Orlando, Florida, Raleigh, Genii Software, Blackberry, iPhone, Google Blog Search, Technorati, Ed Brill, Lotusphere Blog, Chris Miller, IdoNotes, PlanetLotus, Lotus, Facebook, Twitter, TweetUp, City Beverage, Durham