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Why the Internet makes Lotusphere better

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So I was thinking last night about why IBM seems to be getting Lotusphere more this year, and I realised it's more than just IBM and I think it's down to the Internet.

In the last few years, the Lotus on-line community has taken off, more blogs, more podcasts, more open source software.  If you go back a few years, the only people in the Lotus community that were communicating in anyway on-line were compuserve forum users, newsgroup junkies and Lotus business partners using the (still running to this day thank goodness) Notes Partner Forum.  At prior Lotusphere's these people would know a few people who were attending, but they were much smaller groups of hard core Lotus fans with maybe a  party in some poor .individuals room.

Now jump forward to today, there are a couple of hundred active bloggers that you can consider focused on the Lotus space, there are active on-line communities focused on Lotus technologies, OpenNTF, ideajam as examples.  But most of all, there are more readers than posters, and many of these readers go to Lotusphere.  But now they go there knowing about many of the individuals and have a sense of who they are, they know about the places to be on different nights, they know to wear comfortable shoes, they know about the blogger open, they know about LotusphereLive, they know about Jamfest.    I know I still find it very strange when complete strangers come up to me and ask about Jessie and her nose, which gives a certain amount of trust factor when you meet a complete stranger.

Many people believed the internet and web conferencing would be the end of large customer conferences like Lotusphere, personally I think it's the very thing that's re-energized it.

Comments

Gravatar Image1 - Oh, yeah, just look at CES and MacWorld keynotes... hundreds of thousands of people are "there" without ever leaving their desk.

Gravatar Image2 - @1 Don't you think they are mostly people that would never go in the first place? I've watched it online, but never would have attended Macworld in person?

So in that situation the Internet has added to the numbers not lowered.

Gravatar Image3 - CES and formerly Comdex, didn't have lower numbers because of the internet, they had/have lower numbers because of the cost, cost to vendors and cost to attendees.

The biggest thing that killed Comdex was that key vendors stopped going which lead to a reduction in attendees as there was less reason to go. If I remember rightly, Compaq and IBM were the first to drop from Comdex and shortly after others followed.

Gravatar Image4 - It is interesting how the Internet is able to bring together a sense of community with people who you have never meet before. When events are held like Lotusphere, they are almost like being at a reunion.

I had blogged something similar to this yesterday.
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Vaughan Rivett
New Zealand based Lotus Notes Consultant

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