I made it home at 5am this morning. Horrendous delays in air travel through Las Vegas because of some freakish thunderstorms. But I made it.

This weekend I'll be gathering some thoughts and wrapping up a book chapter, so there won't be a lot of posting other than linking to some of my colleagues write-ups here and there.

But one of the things that struck me as really being different at this Expo was the open dialog with CEOs, CTOs and other execs from the solution providers asking about blogging and whether or not they should. Peter Csathy, SightSpeed CEO, started his Digital Media Update blog during the week. He's already posting some really insightful pieces. Lou Guercias, President and CEO of WebDialogs joined the bloggers dinner one evening, and was really interested in the idea of blogging. I had a long chat with Lesley Kirchman from ActionTec and expect to see some blog real soon from the VoSKY team (with a reluctant video star to remain nameless for the moment, but he'll join in).

Rich Tehrani, frankly, left the rest of us who write blogs in the dust at the show. His prolific posts and webcam shorts seemed to pop up every few minutes throughout the day. Kudos to Rich for an intense effort to really cover all there was going on at the show.

I think the point of all this is that the viral, and immediate impact of blog posting, was never more evident at a show than this one. Vendors and solutions providers see blogs as a way of getting their story out quickly. Bloggers are being extended the same courtesies as mainstream press, but there's more than that. Because we focus on specific areas of technology and interest, we're also being viewed as industry analysts. There's a groundswell of trust building, especially in the unified communications sector, that has solution creators, application developers, and hardware manufactures not just talking to bloggers, but sharing information under wraps about their futures. We've gained their trust that we don't just go blather about absolutely everything. And they know we watch the industry closely, so many of them actively seek out our thoughts. I had move than one vendor at the show ask me what other vendors at the show I thought they should go talk to about working with on something new.

All in all, it really was a great and exciting week. But I confess, 18 briefings and speaking 4 times in 3 days does take a toll. I'm going to go decompress a bit, but I'll be back to share some of the really exciting things I talked to people about real soon


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