The Brotherhood (and Sisterhood) of Bloggers

At Sapphire, it has been fun to literally have a Blogger's corner - a whole section of tables in the large press room assigned to bloggers. We have special badges, we have been specifically recognized at general sessions and we have had one-on-one sessions with several executives and social hours with others. In fact, we have had to work to free up time on the schedules to go visit the expo hall. Some curious media types and analysts have walked over to our corner and pinched us to see if we are normal and asked us if we have all-tofu diets. We are treated as part curiosity, part celebrity.

None of the bloggers knew what to expect coming in (I wrote I expected to get lynched). But the treatment so far has been first class. For their part, SAP executives have been taken aback with the level of sophistication of many of the bloggers and are pleasantly surprised by the range of our buyer, investor, partner perspectives. Our questioning has been tough but civil.

And we have bonded as a group. In fact this evening, one of the SAP reps asked us if we were joined at the hip since we always seem to be together.  Well after packing way too many of them in my minivan and a night of cigars and drinks in the Florida outdoors - where high humidity turned to sprinkles - you do expect some stickiness.

Here's the group which has been writing and posting and smoking cancersticks

Zoli Erdos — Zoli’s Blog
Ismael Ghalimi — IT Redux
Ross Mayfield — Ross Mayfield’s Weblog
Jeff Nolan (of SAP) - Venture Chronicles also has some pictures of us at work and play
  Parashanth Rai — CIO-Weblog
Ramana Rao — Information Flow
Niel Robertson — Parallax
Charlie Wood — Spanning Partner
Jason Wood — The Ponderings of Woodrow

We have also been joined by Julia French of SocialText and my old Gartner colleague, Erik Keller who blogs regularly for sandhill.com.

A year ago if you had told me I would be part of a group of bloggers at an enterprise software conference, I would have told you about the Florida swampland I have for sale. Now, I think I will drive my new found friends to it...if we can find time away from our SAP hosts.

Update: Niel describes close encouters of the SAP kind - CEO Henning Kagermann tells his unedited views of bloggers