It’s very important to me as a Gartner analyst that our clients outcompete companies who aren’t our clients. That’s at the heart of pretty much all the research I write and all the interactions I have with my clients: Will what I am telling them help them beat the Other Guy in the marketplace? This conference is about that, too – but it also has an important additional component, which is helping individuals feel comfortable and confident in the workplace.

Not all areas of our coverage have this as a factor. In our coverage area, dealing with such public and popular things as consumerization and Web portals, I want my conference attendees to go home feeling confident that they know more about the world of Web 2.0 and Internet technologies than maybe, even, they strictly need to. My friend Steve – here’s a blog entry from him here about Web 2.0 – is trying to figure out of lot of this. So am I. I have a Facebook profile now, and a LinkedIn profile –

and recently a friend popped up on orkut, which I had FORGOTTEN I had a profile on. (There’s a blended past-and-future senior moment for ya. “I’m so senile I’ve forgotten all the Web sites I should be checking.”) And then this week suddenly I got a mini-flood of requests to “trust” people, or express trust, or something like that, on Spock.com. I’ve ignored MySpace; I’m on Flickr, and del.icio.us. There are days when I wonder what I’m supposed to go to NEXT. (Once upon, I was on sixdegrees, and planetall, and heaven only KNOWS what else.) At least it’s easier now to go from one place to another; when I got to facebook I could import my address book from a wide variety of places (hey? What about Eudora?).

Gartner Events has gotten into the social networking mix too by implementing a new online community to extend the conference experience before and after the actual event dates. Gartner’s Applications Insider Forum is a private community, restricted to registered Summit attendees, which allows people to search for members with similar backgrounds and interests; join groups; participate in group discussions; and blog. It is being launched for just a few summits so register for the PCC Summit, use your special email invitation to logon and let us know what you think of this platform compared to the others.

Anyway, one of the things you could get at the conference (Facebook page) is understanding these things better. We can help you understand what’s important, and why, in grasping this new world – where our identities preceded us into the cloud, and now we’ve joined them. This is fun. Remember that! (We can help.)