An InfoWorld article echoes a lot of what we’ve heard across the MacWorld expo floor and at the conference. Apple’s departure doesn’t have much impact on the vendor itself, or its many partners who don’t need a massive Apple booth to validate innovative third party Mac solutions.

Trade shows do serve businesses that don’t enjoy Apple’s high profile, but if you’re a show-going vendor, sharing a thinly carpeted exhibit floor with Apple isn’t much of a selling point.

This show might appear in another month than the Consumer Electronics Show, suggests Tom Yager. But the IDG expos group has already called 2010 the start of a new era, with a January 4-10 date.

Here on Bites of Apple we focus on small and medium business use of Apple solutions, with an emphasis on partner and third party offerings. But this is a vast universe of reporters and Web sites. The best way to start with an overview is Alltop.

Take a poke into mac.alltop.com to see how many sites, organized by expertise, are reporting and analyzing what’s happening this week. Many have RSS feeds to let you stay current, once you find one that fills your needs Alltop also operates education aggregation pages, as well as ones for photo creatives.