I'll start backwards.....

With the explosion of Social Media and knowing "where to be", Kimono's was really only fun the last night and the first night. In between it was just too packed. Time to find another hang out for mid week me thinks. And with everyone and their dog having a 5MP camera on their phone, it is no longer "what happens as LS, stays at LS". Party accordingly.

The Blogger Open : my team won. So someone has really bad math skills! A valiant effort my Mike McGarel on "the scoring app". I feel for any family that comes to Fantasia Golf that day.

The CGS was a complete and utter train wreak. Whoever thought *not* to put a warning on screen and verbally before Zimmern did his stuff needs firing. Atrocious. And I'd have to say that most of the audience (especially non-US based folks) had no idea who he was. Then came out the blow torch......it was down hill the moment he hit the stage. When the pretzel cookie is the best part of the CGS you have missed your mark by many, many miles. Bring back the likes of the conductor. Now he was impressive.

Wifi : I think the same coffee nazis who kept stealing the coffee ran the wifi. IBM can measure how many purchases are made on mobile devices over Christmas, but not guesstimate that each attendee will have 3-4 wifi devices? A complete WTF all conference long. Social my arse. I wonder how many bloggers, tweeters and analysts gave up posting content about LS12 because of the LS12 wifi?

Blogger of the Year : rightly won by Stuart McIntyre.

Parties : invited to a few. Attended more that I wasn't invited to. The Ephox invite to Australia Day was there, but only if you gave them a closing Portal deal. And I thought I was egotistical! Needless to say I didn't go. But they can have all my portal deals for Q1 and Q2 if they like......or as it's more correctly called: none.

Sessions. I didn't attend that many. Most lost me at the length of the session title and if you were not there for Cloud, XPages or Connections you were shit out of luck. And having the keynotes early didn't help either ;) I pity any Domino Admin that turned up this year, and I think that, and the crappy scheduling will affect the numbers next year. There was no balance if you were there for XPages as you either had days of nothing or 5-6 sessions all at the same time you wanted to attend (ironic that I'm complaining about lack of content and at the same time, cluttered content. If you were there I think you get my meaning). This ain't IBM's first rodeo here so I'm not sure how they don't get this right. There were also a lot of IBMers presenting. I'm guessing IBM want *their* people out front as SME's when businesses realize social and cloud are just prefix words for "services". And where was Lotusphere Idol? I owe a hat tip to Scott Souder for his jibe at the Ask the PM's session. A classy comeback from a classy dude.

Rebranding/Renaming : As IBM bolts headlong away from the Lotus name IBM Docs got on the of the biggest cheers in Ask the PM's as the PM pointed out she had the shortest names product. I guess Lotus Knows not to name any product "Lotus". And Notes, Domino and Quickr are not being rebranded. Party accordingly.

Coffee : tumble weeds, like the coffee

Quickr : Again tumble weeds. In the customer evangelist panel (yes, the panels were actually good!!!) 4 of the 6 "customers" on stage mentioned that they used Quickr. IBM is missing a big opportunity here and will continue to miss it until it sees the need for something that IS NOT FileNet nor Sharepoint. And Connections Files ain't it. In my opinion Connections Files is about as useful as Quickr Entry was. And Quickr Entry was crap. These are your customer evangelists (your = IBM). Do you listen to them?

Capacity : I don't know the official number, but my gut was 4,500-ish. Vendors on the showcase floor did say that foot traffic was much the same as last year. My observation is that there were way more IBMers than before. The Blogger Open was packed, so registrations for that were up 40-50% :)

OGS : yes, I was watching it from my hotel room on the Dolphin, sans clothes. OGS product mentions usually go from flagship down to toilet paper in that order. Let's just say Domino and Notes was 1:40 in before it was even mentioned. Of a 2:00 show. But it was better than last year. And no animals were harmed in the making of the OGS (that should really be implied don't you think?).

Social : Before LS12 it was an overdone word if ever there was one. It's the new decades "e-commerce". Irksome and buzzy in all the wrong way. Like cloud.

Overall : I had fun. I always do when 100's of my favorite people are in the same place, but somehow (and I can't quite put my finger on it) LS12 seemed like it was done on the cheap this year. Maybe the recession is starting to bite even the titan-esque IBM or maybe I am wrong. Either way I had fun and look forward to a more balanced and less cluttered schedule next year.