The first DrupalCon events officially start tomorrow, though some Drupalers have been in town for days and having impromptu gatherings around the city. DrupalCon is going to be incredible with all of the great sessions (106 total!), but the three keynotes are going to be particular standouts. Here’s a preview of what’s coming — these sessions are all going to be too good to miss.

Wednesday, 10:15 am

Dries Buytaert will be sharing his usual “State of Drupal” update on Wednesday morning, and it promises to be particularly interesting this year. Expect highlights to include significant Drupal 7 updates, usability (add1sun just finished up some serious testing, and Mark Boulton Design is signed on to help with Drupal 7), the Drupal.org redesign, and more. Dries started Drupal and guides the project today. Enough said — you want to be there for this one.

Thursday, 10:15 am

David Weinberger, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and most recently, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, will be joining us for a talk titled “Is Drupal Moral?” David is one of the great thought leaders talking about the ideas that move the web, and his talk promises to be interesting and unique. He’s told us he’s really excited about some new ideas that he’ll be sharing with us in his talk. This will be a great talk to get us thinking about some big picture issues as a community.

Friday, 2:30 pm

Chris Messina has been around the Drupal project for a long time — he built the original theme for CivicSpace Labs, one of the first Drupal companies, and helped create the Spread Firefox site on Drupal for the Mozilla Foundation that helped launch Firefox. Since then, Chris has gone on to work on numerous projects, including the push for the adoption of microformats and other open standards. Chris will be giving a talk on online identity and sharing identity between websites – something that will be essential for all of us to think about as online social networking continues to grow and develop (and for that matter, the whole web).