While the majority of people for Lotusphere
arrive into Orlando on the Saturday there are always a couple of early-birds
like myself and Terri, Warren and Kitty and no forgetting Matt White who
arrive in on the Friday to get the partying started.

Last year a few of us went to La Noubia
in Downtown Disney however this year the show is ‘dark’ till January 23rd
so we need to organise a new Pre-lotusphere Friday Night get Together location.

Weather permitting a few of us were
thinking that the outside bar at the Dolphin swimming pools might be a
nice location to kickstart the week.  For those arriving in from Europe
that night it will be a lot easier then dragging themselves to Downtown
Disney and for the smokers it’s an outside location so everybody is happy.

Of course if it’s too cold or raining
hard then we can just relocate to the Dolphin hotel bar at the top of the
escalator where we can morn the loss of the outside balcony for a second
year in a row.

Anyway, in summary…. if the weather
is good then it’s the outside bar at the Dolphin Hotel swimming pools and
if the weather is bad then it’s the inside bar at the top of escalator
in the Dolphin. We’ll probably start arriving at one of those locations
about 8pm.

For the past few years at Lotusphere I’ve
‘Live Blogged’ all the sessions that I attended and I’ve been asked how
I managed to get content up to my blog so quickly during the session so
this year I’m going to reveal my technique in the hope that more people
will be able to Live Blog and give different perspectives on the conference.

1. Try sit somewhere near a power
socket, if you can’t then make sure you have a fully charged battery for
the session. The last thing you want is to lose power half way through,
especially for something like a keynote session.

2. Create a local replica of
your blog. We are using Notes after all so why not make use of one of it’s
most important features. With a local replica you won’t lose time trying
to find a strong WiFi signal that won’t drop out on you halfway through
writing your live blog.

3. Setup auto replication for
your blog. Set the replication interval as low as you can. Personally I
create a new location document that has scheduled replication enabled at
2 minutes, that way I can switch to that location document when live blogging
and then return to my normal location document between sessions.

4. Turn off any extra prompts,
if your blog software prompts if you want to ping external services like
WebLogs or Ping-o-Matic then disable this feature for the duration of the
conference.

5. Before the session starts
create the new blog entry, give it a title, tags, and a little disclaimer
explaining that your live blogging and to excuse spelling mistakes, grammar
etc. Then PUBLISH that blog entry.

6. During the session remember
the CTRL-S key stroke. It will perform a quick save and allow you to keep
typing. Because you have already published your blog entry in the step
before then the CTRL-S will just update the already published entry.

7. After the session don’t forget
to go back and spell check your blog, remove the initial disclaimer and
maybe add a few photos that you might have been able to take.

And there you have it, how to use a
domino based blog for Live Blogging. I’m looking forward to seeing all
the live blogs at Lotusphere this year.

Not able to attend Lotusphere this year
or just want to bring back a few sessions on DVD to share with your work
collegues then check out the Lotusphere DVD
order form for details on which
sessions will be available on DVD. This year there are a total of 71 seperate
sessions being recorded so to order the entire set it will cost you $1114.70
( add an extra $40 if shipping to outside the USA ).