I'm currently looking forward to three excellent conferences in the USA. First up is Philadelphia 2010, a JBoye event that will be held at the Down Town Club from 4-6 May.  The inaugural event last year was a great success despite the rain, and this year the programme is even better. Unlike so many conferences where you have to sort out what to do in the evening in an unfamiliar city there are social events organised for every evening, and as with the Aarhus event that makes for excellent networking. You always need more business cards at a JBoye event than at any others. I'm running a clinic on search implementation covering both web sites and intranets, so bring your problems along for others to solve and for me to get the credit! I'm also giving a paper, based on some recent projects, about the governance challenges with social media. My main challenge is to find time to go and hear the world's largest organ, which is located in Macy's Department Store.

The following week I will be taking part in the Enterprise Search Summit in New York, organised by Information Today. Marti Hearst and Peter Morville will be keynote speakers, with a focus on search user interface design. On Monday 10 May Jed Cawthorne and I will be delivering a workshop on how to get the best from SharePoint 2007 search, as a warm-up act to Miles Kehoe and Mark Bennett from New Idea Engineering talking about search in SharePoint 2010. The conference itself takes place on 11 and 12 May in the Hilton Hotel on 6th Avenue.

Looking further ahead Information Today have moved their KMWorld event (and the associated Enterprise Search Summit Fall event) from San Jose to Washington DC for 2010, which makes it much more accessible from Europe. The conference takes place on 16-18 November in the Renaissance Hotel, Washington. The call for papers is now open.

Martin White