Yes, it's been a crazy busy week of podcasts so far on the ol' Taking Notes Podcast site. Me and Bruce kicked it into overdrive just before Lotusphere.

But why so many all at once? Wah!
Yeah, we hear ya. That's a lot to listen to. But we also know that plenty of people will be travelling many hours to and from Orlando next week, so think of it as travel fodder. Also, it'll help get you in that happy Lotusphere mood.

Why so many vendors? What's up with that?
The simple answer there is that they're vendors with very useful products that just might help you. There's no shame in buying products, you know. Especially when they let you do your job better, or make you look good to the boss.

Plus, if you listen to this stuff before you hit the Product Showcase floor at Lotusphere and you hear something you like, you can head straight to that vendor's pedestal and ask them questions. No more wandering around just looking for the best squishy toys (you can still do that too, of course).

So, here's the lineup so far this week:

• Episode 43: Ytria -- Ytria has some awesome tools that let you manage different parts of your database design (like action bars and documents and views) in ways that you wish Domino Designer did. Also, there are some hidden gems in the interview as Eric Houvenaghel talks about a few Notes developer "gotchas" that you probably don't know about.

• Episode 44: Declan Lynch -- Declan talks about his brand new 3.0 version of the Blogsphere template. It's a must-upgrade if you use the template for Domino blogging, and if you don't you may find some reasons to check it out. He's also doing a Lotusphere session with Steve "IBM Blog Template" Castledine that you might want to see.

• Episode 45: Integra4Notes -- This is a product with some great options for creating reports directly out of a Lotus Notes database, with no design changes to make and no DLLs to distribute and load. Run them from the client, on the server, and even schedule a weekly summary to get sent to your boss every Friday morning as a PDF file. Lots of options at a pretty low cost.

• Episode 46: VoiceRite -- Unified messaging that combines your legacy phone system, Domino e-mail, and Sametime. Get your voicemails delivered as audio files to your e-mail inbox? Yup. Receive incoming phone calls with your Sametime client, and even send an IM message to the caller that gets translated into speech? Yup. Turn your Domino directory into a phone directory that people can call in to and get transferred to someone's extension? Yup. Cool enterprise stuff.

• Episode 48: PSC -- We talked to Jim and Jim from the PSC Group to discuss IBM Websphere Portal, web services, and SOA. Some people think that Portal and SOA is just a huge expensive mess, but listen to the podcast to find out how they actually saved their client $3 million with the implementation.

• Episode 49: Chris Blatnick and Nathan Freeman -- Chris and Nathan are doing a Lotusphere session on designing great user interfaces for Lotus Notes applications, something that I know I definitely need to see. Find out what they're going to talk about and why you should go too. Save the Notes client, save the world.

That's all for now, but we'll have plenty more next week. Chris Miller's been busy too, so Listen Up!