Blog Business Summit Heads to the City of Broad Shoulders

The upstart Blog Business Summit is headed to the Midwest for its latest installment, to be held at the Chicago City Centre Hotel and Sports Club from September 17th to the 19th.

The first day of the three-day event features an intriguing workshop on Social Media and the Enterprise. Platform makers will be on hand to sell businesses on how enterprise blogging, wikis, IM and social networks can increase the speed and efficacy of communication within corporate teams. Presentations by Microsoft, IBM Lotus and WordPress follow a keynote by Jerry Bowles of the Social Media Collective and the Enterprise Web 2.0 Blog. The rest of the event includes an interesting lineup of speakers and presenters as well, including representatives from Motorola, Eastman Kodak and The Economist.

2007 marks the first year that the Summit has ventured from the West Coast. Previously it had made stops in tech mainstays Seattle and San Francisco. However, as most Midwesterners will remind you, the Chicago area actually has the highest concentration of tech workers in the country. Nevertheless, there will likely be some hay made about Enterprise 2.0 making its way to a hub of the old economy.

Location change aside, this year's Summit, despite attracting some big-name vendors and promising healthy attendance, doesn't necessarily have the marks of a watershed year. While IBM Lotus will no doubt be touting its recently released Connections software and Quickr , Blogtronix its brand new Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform, and Microsoft its Office SharePoint Server 2007 with the Community Kit, nothing oscillates with anticipatory buzz.

But is buzz all that important? A manager could leave a relatively inexpensive three-day conference in September with a great feel for the collaboration technology that's out there and how it can streamline team communications, improve information flow and bring the group closer together. On the heels of the well-attended mid-June Enterprise 2.0 conference held in Boston, this Summit is sure to be full of small and large businesses who are excited about implementing some of the Enterprise 2.0 tools they've been hearing about. As one attendee of the Boston Enterprise 2.0 conference noted, that was the most interesting revelation of all.