Friday, January 26, 2007

Lotusphere 2007: Final Day

Lotusphere 2007 is over. After a full five days, my brain is tired from everything that has been added - and my feet and legs are tired from all the walking.

Started the day (7am!) at the blogging Birds of a Feather. Lots of people were there, including a lot of the most common bloggers you hear about. This community has grown each year. I said last night that we need to give some focus to keeping the community growing so we don't just become an echo chamber. These people are all supportive of each other so contact anyone if you want to know more about blogging or wonder how to get started.

I did a hands-on about Low-Fidelity Prototyping. The idea is to develop the user interface first (before any coding) and use paper and pencil. That way the users can feel free to change anything to make it work better for them. It is a cool idea that I hope to try sometime soon.

The Great Code Giveaway, by Rob Novak (the LotusRockStar) and Viktor Kranz, had a lot of good things for web development. That doesn't affect me a lot right now but may come in handy later.

Gurupalooza got off to a kind of slow start but then got rolling. Probably the biggest thing that came out of that was bloggingconnections.com. That is where a Lotus Connections server will be, hosted by Chris Miller and Connectria, to help connect members of the Lotus community using the new Connections product.

Ask the Developers was pretty calm. Bob Balaban got razzed for not updating and finishing the LSX Toolkit, handed off the "traditional first question" and it went from there. The last question was whether Lotus would ever use Connections to back a social networking (eg. dating) site and one of the developers said they already had a name: the Quickr Picker Upper. It brought down the house.

The Closing Session featured Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist with the research section of the American Museum of Natural History.

My evening closed with dinner with around 30 other bloggers. Ed Brill and Alan Lepofsky joined us, not as reps from Lotus but as friends and fellow community members. It was nice to talk with Alan, Ed, Bill Buchan, Andrew Kelly and others. Andrew was someone people lost track of during this past year and he said he was embarrassed that people had to work so hard to track him down. We finally settled (I think) that it wasn't necessary to be embarrassed, but to feel good that people cared enough to look.

Thanks to everyone for a great week. I need to take some time to digest everything and organize my thoughts, but I am excited to get back and start putting some of these new things to use. Hope to see you again next year (Jan. 20-24).

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