Lotusphere begins!

Yes it is that time again. When the bumblebee backpacks swarm over the Walt Disney Swan and Dolphin hotels. Lotusphere 2009 officially kicked off this morning with JumpStart sessions and Business Development Day.

Now obviously for some of us, festivities started yesterday (or earlier) and the BALD dinner on the Boardwalk and the Saturday Night ESPN party. Both were a rousing success. Met some new people, and reconnected with all the old ‘family.’ It really is the time of year where we can recharge those Lotus batteries with like-minded people. Very cool indeed.

This year, in addition to being an attendee and press, I am also one of the 25 bloggers that have been invited to participate in a Lotusphere pilot blogger program. We have a sneak peak at some stuff today, and a Q&A with top execs tomorrow. There is even going to be a ‘Blogger Pit’ where we all get to sit for the Opening General Session tomorrow. Rumors are that we will even have power hookups to help us out. So that should be cool. Look for a lot of killer information to be coming out of the blogging community over the next couple of days. And, if you haven’t followed people on Twitter before, this is really the time to start. You will see information AS it happens in the Twitter stream.

For example, today at BDD, Elguji Software, the creators of IdeaJam and LinkJam won the Breakthrough Technology award. Twitter lit up like a Christmas tree when that happened, and well-deserved congratulations flew fast and furiously. Normally you would have to wait until people left BDD, but we got it in real time. Twitter rules for this kind of thing! You’ll probably see a lot more posts from me on there than here, but I’ll try to give good summary posts here throughout the week!

So for those of you that couldn’t make it, I hope you can live vicariously through me and the rest of the community for this week. We’ll try not to let you down!