Here’s a great offer for those of you in the IT community that couldn’t make it to Davos this week. Sign up for the World Innovation Forum in New York City in May.

It costs $2,800 for two days not counting T&E. But wait — operators are standing by and if you call right now — the price is reduced to $2,190.

Of course it only applies to those of you with unlimited 2009 IT budgets and only if you have a boss that it always urging you to take those trips that you really do need to take to user-group and BOF meetings.

This conference is important because:

“In a fast-paced, technology-driven, and constantly changing world, innovation is more critical than ever.  Innovation paves the way to increased profitability, business solutions and growth.”

The above sentence is right out of the 1980s, and so is the idea of such conferences.

The event caught my eye because it is sponsoring a contest among bloggers to get bloggers to “cover it.”  Right away that tells you

(1) that the organizers of this event do not understand the dynamics of blogging and

(2) there will not be much useful information at the event if they have to bribe someone to write about it.

My first reaction was to send an approval form into the boss as a joke but on the other hand, with everything that’s going on in the world (and maybe in your company), that idea is not even funny.

But do keep pushing the boss to make sure that you can get to the important user group meetings in your area of IT (be it a Sapphire, ApacheCON, Oracle World, SHARE meeting, etc.)