OraNA :: Oracle News Aggregator

For a few months now, I’ve been planning to write a post on how to get involved in your local tech scene.

I caught a tweet from Matt earlier today. He was on his way to Startup Rockstars DC#3.

Sounds like fun. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve probably seen me tweet about any number of Portland tech events, like Lunch 2.0, Beer and Blog, Ignite Portland, BarCamp Portland, the list goes on for a while. I’ll spare you.

Portland has a lot of geeky events and a strong tech community, but many of these events can be recreated just about anywhere, e.g. Lunch 2.0, Ignite, and BarCamp were all imported from other cities.

Others, like Beer and Blog, are easy to start. Beer and Blog was started by a group of local bloggers who got together to work on their blogs during Friday Happy Hour at a local pub. It’s now a work/social event each Friday, sometimes sponsored by a local company.

I’ve chatted with Chet the ORACLENERD about starting a Tampa Beer and Blog chapter, hoping he hasn’t lost interest. It really is good fun.

Portland’s culture fits these gatherings well; there are a lot of nomadic, freelance geeks and home-based telecommuters who don’t get the usual cubicle, watercooler office experience. So, we like to congregate in wi-fi hotspots to socialize while we work. The good news is you can pick your coworkers. The bad news is work and concentration are tougher to achieve.

Being out and about already, it’s easy to drop by a geeky gathering and visit with your coworkers. Even if you have a traditional office, stopping by an evening event isn’t too difficult. It’s well worth the time spent to meet like-minded people who live in your town.

This is all thanks to the Intertubes. Think about it: you can announce and promote an event (blog, Twitter), manage a group of volunteers (Basecamp), get an idea of who’s attending (Upcoming), publish the content (blog, SlideShare, wiki), get feedback (blog, Twitter) and stay in touch with all the new people you meet (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn).

You can do this in your town too. Chances are good there are already some events you can attend. If you live in the Bay Area, you already know, and you’ve got your pick of dozens of these types of geeky meetups. A quick search on Upcoming for your town will tell you what’s out there and who’s going.

Of course, all these techniques work for any kind of get-together, geeky or otherwise. They just tend to work better for geeks, since we’re online all day, every day.

So why would you want to do this? Who cares about meeting other geeks? Based on what I hear coming out of events like OpenWorld, people really get a kick out of meeting people they know virtually. I know I do. It’s a great chance to exchange ideas with people you know have similar interests to your own.

Getting involved with you local tech scene allows you to do the same thing, i.e. connect with like-minded people IRL. No need to wait for a conference; these events are happening all the time. You never know when you’ll meet someone whose blog you read, someone who has the skills to help you with a side-project, someone who has a great idea and needs help, etc.

Did I mention that most of these events are free?

What do you think? A lot of people have time constraints, which is why daytime events like Lunch 2.0 may be appealing. Find the comments and share your thoughts, experiences, questions, all of that.

Maybe Matt will grace us with a review of Startup Rockstars DC.

Paul will be one of the featured presenters at the 2008 Communities Exchange Summit, next week. His presentation is called “It’s Not About the Tools: How Oracle Builds Customer Communities”.

There’s a teaser Q&A session posted, if you want more incentive. If you’re in San Jose next week and want to check it out, here’s the skinny.

2008 Communities Exchange Summit
Join B2B Customer Communities professionals from many of the top programs in the world for two days of networking, idea exchange, and building professional relationships with your peers in this emerging profession.

Join community building professionals from may of the top programs in the world, including Oracle, Dell, Intuit, Salesforce.com, Microsoft, Intel, EMC, Citrix Systems, Riverbed Technology, Software AG, Front Range Solutions, KANA and other leading firms.

Where: Hayes Mansion, San Jose, CA

When: October 14-15 (with opening reception on the evening of Monday, October 13), 2008

What to Expect: Lots of networking with your peers. Lots of opportunity for group interaction. Emphasis on presentations by leading practitioners working with Customer Communities, rather than vendors. Opportunity for those just starting out to “learn the ropes” of running Customer Communities Programs!

If you’re attending, stop by and say hi to Paul, maybe rattle his cage a bit with some tough questions.

While we’re talking about conferences, it looks like Paul will also be speaking at Defrag this year. Defrag is in Denver, November 3-4. Sounds cold. I’ll be attending as well for giggles. Check out the speaker list, solid.

Thanks to Matt for covering Geode. I have to agree with his assessment of location as awesomesauce when mixed with Intertubes.

Continuing my mission to slog through all the unread feeds I have left over from the week of OpenWorld, I noticed an item from Mashable about the simple and elegant Umbrella Today?

The concept is dead simple. Enter a zip code, get a yes or no. They do ruin it a bit for me by offering to text me when I need an umbrella, a useful feature I suppose, but it takes away from the boolean simplicity, which I absolutely love.

I roadtested it for Portland, and the result was correct, except for the minor fact that anyone with an umbrella here in PDX is marked as a soft tourist.

Mashable compares Umbrella Today? to another site I love, Down for everyone, or just me?, which can help you diagnose your website is down problems.

Lately, I’ve been a bit obsessed with simplifying things, e.g. one of the features of Ubiquity I like is its potential to simplify complex actions into commands.

Think about for a second. All the “features” offered by Umbrella Today? can be got elsewhere, but if you go to the Weather Channel or NOAA, you have to filter through a lot of other information to get the answer to that very simple question. The same can be said for Down for everyone.

Simple just isn’t trendy though, e.g. Facebook just announced their integration with Microsoft Live Search. So now you can query the ‘tubes with your keyword search and get the results without leaving Facebook.

Frankly, I don’t find the integration of Intertubes search results into my social network as a value-add (although I would consider Intranet results valuable), but I have no doubt this will be valuable to many of the recent converts to Facebook. Unfortunately, I think the concept of tabbed-browsing is not universally accepted as cool, much to my dismay. That’s a topic for a different time though.

Sure, I get why Facebook added Live Search, and I get why Microsoft wanted that as part of the equity stake they took in Facebook a year ago. It’s a solid, tried-and-true, Intertubes business model to extend your feature set to keep those eyeballs looking at your site. My point is about simplicity.

Let’s look back a what made Google successful. Two things, a really good index and awesome algorithm and a simple interface. Ten years ago, web portals were on top, My Excite, My Yahoo, remember them? Google offered none of the clutter and better results.

As more data become available through lightweight, easy-to-consume APIs, I expect to see a return to simple. There’s way too much information floating around, so the market for simple is huge. There’s even a business model there too, i.e. good old ads. Umbrella Today? should have no trouble finding advertisers if they so desire.

Both simple and complex have their place, but I’m advocating the less is more principle.

So, what do you think? Do you like bells and whistles and platforms that unify functionality? What do you think about simple, targeted apps? Sound off in comments.

Curious? That seemed like a clever title, given the subject, and my lack of pithy title for the post.

I’ll back up a bit. I’m still slogging through feeds from before OpenWorld, which is pretty tough considering Paul’s got me cranking hardcore on a new project. I plowed through Slashdot today and found an item linking to “The Thirteen Greatest Error Messages of All Time“.

Stop now and see if you can guess the winner. No hints.

Error messages are an interesting subject to me, and I found it extremely funny (and awesome) that someone has built a t-shirt business around errors, called Errorwear. Bonus points for 403 Forbidden available in women’s sizes only, “You don’t have permissions to access /girl on this server.”

As a product manager, error messages are a necessary evil. I  design and build a product to work, not fail, which makes the prospect of planning for failures a bit icky. No one wants to write error messages, and often, developers end up writing messages during testing when unforeseen failures occur.

The best error messages are are clear and concise, but the reality of software makes writing clear and concise error messages a near impossibility. I would often wonder if anyone bothered to read error messages.

According to another gem in my Reader from a few weeks ago, a recent study of users failed to read popup warnings, mindlessly clicking OK just to dismiss a dialog box, regardless of what OK meant. Hard to excuse this, even for web browsing.

Even if they ignore error messages, people expect to be told when something goes awry. Think about the last time an application just quit or froze unexpectedly. Bummer, eh? Rich and I whipped up a funny (in our estimation) version of the generic “something went wrong” error message we use for Connect.

We throw a genric Error 500 page with “game over man” and some other general verbiage. The page also includes the sound bite of Bill Paxson’s “game over man” line from Aliens, for giggles. I guess funny error messages aren’t expected either because at least one user thought the site was a joke and sent us feedback asking just that.

Anyway, if you use Oracle at all, you’re familiar with the error codes book (or HTML page). A few of my favorites:

• ORA-00600:internal error code
• ORA-00942:table or view does not exist
• ORA-01031:insufficient privileges
• ORA-01034:ORACLE not available

No Oracle errors made the best list, and the winner wasn’t really a surprise. It’s your old friend, BSoD in all its incarnations. I’d like to say I’m done with BSoD, but alas, my wife’s XP box still throws it from time, to time.

So, what’re your favorites? Have any insights into error messages? Find the comments.

Wow, after a slew of posts from other people, it’s back to just me.

I’ve documented my affection for Flickr in the past. Recently, Rich put me on to another reason to love Flickr.

Groups.

While I was at OpenWorld, I was chatting with Rich about a little iPhone hobby I have. I like to take pictures of signs that interest me. Interesting is a pretty broad category; some I find funny, others dumb. Some have good UI, i.e. they use the relatively constraining stick person on yellow palate to convey a pretty difficult meaning.

Rich suggested I create a Flickr group for them. So, I did. Check out my collection and feel free to join and add your own shots or comment on mine.

Yesterday, Paul blogged his own personal passion for documenting bad design. This is great stuff, and I actually find myself evaluating the design of everyday objects too. Incidentally, I’m still puzzled with the coffee cup design. It’s like a lawsuit creator. I wonder if that was an irregular lot that fell off a truck or something.

Anyway, I suggested Paul create a Flickr group for his bad design Hall of Shame, and he promptly did. It’s also public, so join up and contribute your thoughts and samples.

So, what’s the big deal?

Well, beyond offering another way for people to coalesce around a subject they find interesting, they can discuss and contribute their own content, e.g. the FAIL Blog, I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER, or even something small like my geek-speak slides.

I’ll bet a lot of people use their camera phones or digital cameras to take snapshots of things they find interesting, so why not create a hobby around this activity? My wife walks around town a lot, walking dogs, and during the Spring, she collected a bunch of shots of the flowers of Portland. I’m willing to bet this would be a popular group.

Flickr offers a quick and easy way to build up an ad hoc community through groups. They even list “Groups we’ve noticed” if you’re interested in browsing new, cool, or popular groups.

The huge plus that sites like Flickr and SlideShare offer is a way to expose content you’ve created to a wider audience and license it under Creative Commons. So, you can promote your work and ensure you get credit for it all in one package.

I doubt my group or Paul’s will become a huge group, but I’m sure they will attract seemingly random interest, very similar to what I noticed with my geek-speak slides. I enjoy watching these random effects.

So, check out our groups and contribute if you like. And share your groups if you have any.

So, another +1 for Flickr. What do you think? Find the comments.

If you read here, you’re probably on the leading, if not bleeding, edge of the early adoption curve. Bit of a mixed metaphor, so let’s say early adopter scythe.

Anyway, Facebook is old news. For about the last year or so, I’ve rarely logged into Facebook; I guess the sheep-throwing and incessant poking and super-poking got monotonous for me, and I lost track of Facebook’s biggest and best feature.

The network and its effects.

Lately, I’ve been reminded of how much I like Facebook by a slew of adds from old high school classmates. As mentioned before, I don’t come from the generation of digital natives, so the appearance of my old chums from the late 80s and early 90s signals Facebook’s passage into the mainstream.

I also have a MySpace account, and not a single person from that same category of old high school buddies has friended me over there. It’s not entirely a fair comparison, but it says a lot for Facebook’s ascent to the thrown as the social network, erm utility, for people new the whole thing.

The appearance of these old friends has reminded me how really cool social networking can be. I’ve reconnected with a dozen or so friends lost to me over the intervening decades, which has made me realize again how cool, fun, and useful social networking is.

I’m pretty sure some of the people are simply collecting friends because some of them I barely remember, and I doubt they remember me any more clearly. But that’s part of the fun of networking, almost like collecting trading cards; you know you’ve done it too, don’t lie.

For many companies, becoming mainstream means a loss of coolness, but I think Facebook has done a good job maintaining their cool factor, even in the face (pun intended) of stiff competition from upstarts and MySpace.

While we’re on the subject of Facebook, am I in the minority for liking the new UI? I know Rich likes it too, but there seems to be a backlash against it. I’m not sure why. I think it uses space much more efficiently, and they’ve introduced a few neat elements.

I especially like the chat design and the applications bookmark. Segregating apps from the profile was a solid choice too.

What do you think? Like it? Hate it? Why?

What about the mainstreaming of Facebook? Have you noticed this too?

Find the comments.

With the memory of OpenWorld fading, I wanted to riff on one thing I noticed and found interesting last week.

Stickers, or rather the lack of them.

Rich and and I whipped up a last-minute plan to produce some stickers right before OpenWorld, and many of you were the beneficiaries last week. I added the AppsLab sticker to my Macbook, which is getting crowded pretty fast. Rich, Matt and Raimonds were among the others who had sticker-adorned laptops, but we were in the minority.

Most people at the conference had naked laptops, or if a sticker appeared, it was an asset tag, natch. Not at all surprising because most people had their work computers with them, but also because the conference was a serious business conference and not the place for childish stickers.

Or so my wife would have me believe. She teased me for putting stickers on my Macbook, but how else can I tell our otherwise identical Macbooks apart when they’re sitting on the table? I tend to have that problem when I go to other geeky meetups or conferences because, well, Macbooks are common among geeks.

The lack of stickers on laptops and as giveaway chochkies on the show floors got me thinking about why we adorn our laptops. I think for me and other geeks, the laptop is another appendage, and beyond the ability to find it in a crowded room, it’s a great place to show your support for your favorite geeky tool or cause or hobby or whatever.

We love our computers, and stickers provide tattoos to personalize them. The comparison to tattoos fits because my guess is it’s pretty hard to get rid of a sticker you don’t want any more.

Stickers seem to be marginalized now, but I think that like Web 2.0, the next year will bring them into the mainstream as must-haves for your favorite appendage, erm your laptop.

I did get some funny looks at OpenWorld while sporting my stickered-out Macbook. It does stand out in the crowd of gray Dells and Thinkpads and, dare I say, the undecorated, silver Macbook Pros? That’s fine by me, and I’m betting next year, there will be more Macs and more stickers at OpenWorld. The question is how much real estate for new ones I’ll have by then.

I’ve also noticed the sticker is becoming a replacement for the business card, at least in some circles. People have noticed the trend toward stickering the laptop and have taken advantage. What better way to show your support for your favorite Open Source project or company? Anyone else want a Twitter sticker?

Another reason the sticker beats the business card for me is because I can’t keep a current business card. I move or change jobs too often to keep it current. I still have 450 or so of the 500-card box I got several years ago; since I got them, about 75% of the information has changed. And yet I still have them because if I were wasteful, I’d have about 2,000 useless cards.

The sticker, on the other hand, forces brevity. It provides the essential information and a logo. Maybe a URL. Ever see a fax number on a sticker? Me neither.

I’m not saying the sticker will replace the business card. I just think it’s a viable competitor, especially with people like me, who are likely to stick it somewhere useful versus in a drawer, in a laptop bag, etc.

Ever lose a business card? Those suckers are small, and I’m constantly fishing them out from under my desk. Sure the same can be said for a sticker, unless it’s stuck to something.

What do you think? My guess is most of you who read here and comment will be pro-sticker. Prove me wrong in the comments.

So now OpenWorld 2008 is over, and San Franciscans rejoice as Howard Street reopens between 3rd and 4th, or at least it will soon.

I missed my Wednesday recap, since we spent Thursday sequestered in that same old conference room in Pleasanton. Not a lot happened for me on Wednesday.

Rich and I trolled the exhibit floors in Moscone South and West, visiting Dan, OpenWorld King 2008, in his Piocon booth and Harold Green in his video production room. We were looking for stickers, the geek’s business card, but we found precious few.

Over in Moscone West, we tried out the game room; Rich skiied a bit, and I dominated him at air hockey, twice. We also found a Delorean on the show floor, pretty cool. I’m surprised the speedometer only went to 85 mph, since we all remember you have to go at least 88 mph before the cool stuff happens.

In the afternoon, we all watched the keynotes. After announcing X, Larry headed out pretty quickly. John (the Ontario Emperor) suggested that he hadn’t seen that my geek-speak session had been moved to Tuesday morning. I got a kick out of that.

Afterwards, I did some networking with Tim Hall, Chris Muir and others before people headed out for the bit Treasure Island shindig.

Not sure what went on Thursday since I was in Pleasanton all day, but I was a bit bummed to miss Raimonds’ unconference session about Rails on Oracle and John’s biometrics unconference session. Here are Raimonds’ slides; he’s done some awesome stuff with Rails on top of EBS.

| View | Upload your own

So, it’s over now. As with every year, my OpenWorld highlights are all around networking. Working remotely from home, I rarely see the people I work with or talk to on a regular basis. So, it was good to see you all. Let’s do it again soon.

Tuesday was a lighter schedule for me, but not without its drama.

My geek-speak Unconference session, which continues to bounce around Indian blogs, was at 10 AM, and I arrived in the room 40 minutes in advance, JIC. Good thing because I had forgotten the Mini DVI-VGA adapter for my Macbook.

For those who haven’t run into this or don’t have a Mac laptop, Apple’s hardware doesn’t have VGA outputs, which are standard on basically all the projectors you’ll find. So, you’ll need a DVI-VGA adapter, depending on the laptop, e.g. the Macbook Pro has a standard DVI out, the Macbook has a smaller, Mini-DVI out, and the Macbook Air has the itty-bitty, Micro-DVI output.

Luckily, there’s an Apple store right nearby Moscone Center. I’ve walked past it every day between the conference and my hotel, but I wasn’t sure it would be open at 9:30 AM. Taking a chance, I motored over there, working up an annoying sweat.

People were going inside, so I figure they’re open. Turns out they were, but only for Genius Bar appointments. Doh.

I managed to plead my way into the store to get the adapter and made it back to my session room with minutes to spare. Now for the irony. When projected, the black slides were basically unreadable, thanks to the sunlight pouring in through the windows.

I decided to run the slideshow off my laptop because there were only a few people there. Turns out I didn’t need the adapter, but now I have a spare I can carry with me to avert this crisis in the future. That makes me a feel a little less foolish.

What about the session? So, we started out with three people, Matt, Frank Bradley and a woman taking a conference call. We decided to chat instead, and then people began to arrive. The final tally was ten or so.

I think it went well, and I had fun chatting with everyone. It was a very formal session, natch, more of a conversation. Thanks for coming if you did. Feel free to use and add to the content. It’s shared with a Creative Commons attribution-non commercial-share alike license over at SlideShare, and I’m hoping it becomes a working deck that evolves over time.

After geek-speak, I was done with my sessions for the conference. In the afternoon, Chris gave his Unconference session on Google APIs. As expected, it was popular, with about 20 or so people attending. This doesn’t sound very crowded, but with only 24 hours of promotion time, it was popular. I haven’t seen many other Unconference sessions, but I suspect that 20 is a nice number. I think we could have easily doubled that, given a bit more promotion time.

Chris covered a lot of APIs, and I’m hoping he’ll upload his slides to SlideShare (done). His talk made me want to geek out, and I now have a bunch of ideas rattling around my head.

Last night was our team dinner. Paul likes to do one whenever we assemble for a conference. Because we each work in different area codes (503, 510, 650, 925), we don’t get together very often IRL. The last time was in April at Web 2.0 Expo, and at that team dinner, Anthony ordered a giant prime rib.

Like a good solider, he sweated and worked at that steak for a long time. In the end, it defeated him, but not by much. This time, I guess he’d been training, because he ordered an even larger steak, about the size of his head.

He didn’t get very far, but I think his lunches for the week are good to go.

Afterwards, I hung out with the usual suspects (again). On my way back to the hotel, I ran into a guy asking for money. Not all that noteworthy, expect his pitch was transparency.

He explained that he wanted (not needed) money to get drunk, and he assured me that my money would absolutely not be used for food or any other purpose.

+1 for honesty.

We’re having some hiccups with the comments. Rich opened a thread with Disqus about it; anyone seen this? You can leave comments, but who knows if they’ll be around after we get this issue sorted.

As is typical for me, the Monday of OpenWorld was the busiest. Now that it’s over, I can relax a bit. Yesterday was an action-packed day, so let’s hit the highlights. Roll the tape.

Our official session “Web 2.0 Technologies In the Enterprise: Lessons Learned, Tips, and Tricks from Oracle AppsLab” went pretty well. I’m not so good at counting people in a crowd, but it looked like about 70 attended, including several old friends of the ‘Lab and a lot of new faces. A nice mix.

Check out the slides.

They told us the session was recorded, so eventually, if I can get that, I’ll share it here.

After the official session, we headed to the Unconference for our “Adventures in OpenSocial” talk. Mickey Kim and Chris Shalk from Google attended and fielded some questions from the attendees and asked some of us.

Eddie was one of the 20-ish attendees, and he recorded a portion of it. The projected images are pretty hard to see, but you can hear what we’re saying. You’ll be hearing more about OpenSocial from us. So, if you haven’t been reading the older coverage, you can catch up now.

Chris decided to do an Unconference session today at 3 PM (Moscone West, 3rd Floor, Overlook C) about Google’s APIs. Here’s his abstract:

“Integrating Google APIs into your applications”

In addition to the Google Maps API, you may be surprised to know about all of the other Google APIs that are freely available to integrate into your applications. These include the AJAX APIs for integrating Google Search, Feeds and Language translations into your Web pages/applications. For server-side integration, Google’s Data APIs allows you to interact with many of Google’s online services including Calendar, Blogger, YouTube among others. Finally you can use the Google led OpenSocial Open Source software to build your own social applications and/or container to host social applications. This talk will cover all of these topics in a casual manner with an emphasis of showing working demos of Google technology integrations.

I wish we’d had this to promote before the conference began, and I really hope people attend. This is a great opportunity to combine the enterprise development talents of attendees with Google’s APIs. This is how mashups and composite apps are born.

Last night at OTN Night, I spent a lot of time chatting with Eddie, Dan and David. We were brainstorming ideas for future OpenWorlds. Oddly, this year’s attendance is slightly lower than last year’s, but from some reason, it feels larger to me.

We all thought using the Ignite format for Oracle topics would be very entertaining. The format is five minutes, 20 slides, advancing every 15 seconds. Hard stop. Thanks for coming.

I’ve attended several of the Portland Ignites, and they’re quite fun.

We also talked about an Oracle Barcamp, which seems logical since the Unconference seems pretty popular, and adding a formal hackathon could be fun too. We bounced our ideas off Justin, so I guess we’ll see what happens.

Now some random observations.

The blogger credential continues to be a hot commodity. I heard they have special tables at the keynotes, so that’s probably one reason. I got a chance to meet several bloggers last night at the PR welcome, and I’m really happy with the attendance numbers.

Plus, many of the bloggers who are here have independent blogs with small readerships, and I’m glad they got the opportunity to come cover a big event.

Twitter has been more chore than tool so far. I keep forgetting to check it. I should turn device notifcations on, but there’s a much larger volume of chatter around the conference this year. This is overall a good thing, if only I could remember to join the conversation.

More tomorrow. Your thoughts belong in the comments. They miss you.

Rather than blog the events of an entire day, I’ve decided to dump my thoughts periodically.

This is more effective for me anyway, since to remember anything lately, I feel like I need to forget something else. So, a memory dump will happen eventually, better (or worse, depending) to get it recorded before the inevitable happens.

Here we go. Last night was the blogger meetup (thanks to Justin) at the Thirsty Bear. Great time had by all. I love these meetups because I get to meet people I interact withon the ‘tubes IRL.

Apparently, this OpenWorld is Dan’s. Open. World. Dan’s tips for OpenWorld n00bs made it into Judy Sim’s keynote this morning; she also mentioned them in the employee pre-conference call last week. He’s playing dumb, but I’m beginning to wonder.

Dan did bring the best chochky of the conference so far. He had conference-style ribbons printed with pithy little sayings on them. I assume this sprang out of Collaborate in April when Dan, Floyd and others had what looked like a dozen ribbons attached to their badge lanyards. As you can see, I run with scissors and read your email, sometimes at the same time.

Other observations:

• For every Mac, there are ten or more PCs. Not really a surprise.
• Blogger credentials are a hot commodity, especially the big orange lanyards. Not sure why, but now I want one.
• Twitter is way bigger this year.
• There isn’t enough again, natch. I wonder if Moscone ever plans to add more outlets.
• People still tape authentication details to their laptops. I sat next to a guy with a little Post-It on his laptop, explaining how to hack into his corporate network. I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am.
• Matt and I saw a guy get knocked down by a car, while walking legally in a crosswalk. Be careful out there.

This morning, we’re off and running, hanging in the OTN Lounge. Come by and visit.

To avoid overlapping with Larry’s keynote on Wednesday afternoon, as promised, I have rescheduled my Unconference session, “Are you insulting me? Essential geek-speak, FTW!” to Tuesday morning at 10 AM in Moscone West, 3rd floor, Overlook C.

If you’re interested, check out the slides on SlideShare.

If you make it, stop by and say hello.

On my way to PDX, I caught this tweet from the OCP Advisor (aka Mohan Dutt):

Naturally intrigued, I clicked through on the link to find an “idea” from Debra Lilley called simply:

Get me out of this lift, please , stuck in lift #11 at the Marriott

Eagle-eyed users of Mix, namely John Bedford, an Oracle employee, summoned the authorities, and Debra and company were rescued after about an hour and a half in captivity.

A few things here. First, as has been stated many times in the past, Web 2.0 is useful for real world/real time emergencies, and this is an example, albeit on a smaller scale, affecting fewer people.

Second, it’s hard to avoid the chuckles when during a campaign called Oracle Listens, not only does the company listen, but it also calls the authorities to rescue you out of the elevator.

Anyway, I’m glad Debra and her elevator pals are all safe and sound, and I’m happy that Mix could help expedite their rescue. I wonder if she had time to think of any groundbreaking ideas for Oracle during her time in the elevator.

If this is any indication, it’ll be a fun week.

Now, onward into the breach that is OpenWorld. I’m blogging from the OTN Lounge on the third floor of Moscone West, where I’m hoping to cool my heals most of the week. It’s Sunday, and parts of the conference are still being constructed. Still, there are a lot of people here already, milling around, attending sessions; it’s going to be a long week.

One last programming update, it looks like my geek-speak session will be moved to Tuesday morning.

Stay tuned for more.

By this time tomorrow, I’ll be winging my way to the Bay Area for OpenWorld.

One of the first things I need to do tomorrow is race to the Unconference onsite signups in Moscone West and move my Essential Geek-Speak session to a better time, like say one that doesn’t overlap with Larry’s keynote.

You may recall I released the slides for that session a week ago, hoping to get some early commentary and feedback.

I uploaded them to SlideShare, and over last weekend, they were selected by the SlideShare team as one of the “Featured” presentations. W00t!. So, they ran on the SlideShare homepage for a bit and were seen by a lot more people than I expected.

For example, Amit Ranjan liked them and embedded them on his blog, Webyantra: Ground Zero for Indian Web 2.0.

Then another blog based in India, Trak.in: Indian Business Buzz, picked them up from Amit. Love the Intertubes.

Now, looking at the embed stats for my slides (a very cool feature of SlideShare), there have been more views generated by these two sites combinged than from the post I did here. Interesting.

So I got to thinking about why the content would be so popular in India, or maybe it was just a coincidence. Then I remembered a tweet from Eddie months ago asking what I meant by “FTW“, incidentally the most overused acronym on Twitter.

But Eddie’s a hardcore geek, so what gives?

My guess is that since geek-speak features heavy doses of American pop culture, a lot of it gets lost in translation.

This hadn’t occured to me previously, but it makes perfect sense. Taking FTW, or “for the win”, as an example, you have:

• A lot of people who have no idea what it means at all.
• A smaller group uses it.
• A even smaller group knows what it stands for, as well as how it’s used.
• A tiny group knows and/or remembers the phrase from Hollywood Squares.

Random thought: I should start using the sibling phrase from Hollywood Squares, FTB, “for the block”, as the anti-FTW.

This is my take on why the slides are popular in India. What do you think? One of the reasons I decided to do this Unconference session is to expose people to this sub-language that’s increasingly prominent thanks to the ‘tubes and other technologies like texting.

Another reason was to have a laugh, which I plan to do regardless.

Anyway, the slides are slim on bullets and explanation, since I’m not a fan of reading the bullets off slides. So, I plan to update them after the conference with some additional context for those who can’t make it to the live version.

Watch this space for an updated time for the session. I hope people will show up and add to the discussion, which isn’t really as trivial and fluffy as it appears on the surface.

As for next week, I’m hoping to blog a bit, but my schedule is pretty heavy. So, don’t be surprised if this space goes dark for the week. If you want to track me down at the conference, try Twitter (jkuramot), email, leave a comment here, light a beacon, throw up the AppsLab signal, etc.

Hope to see you there.

So, yet another last-minute OpenWorld announcement, but that’s how we roll. We’re going to host an informal hackathon at the OTN Lounge during the conference.

The OTN Lounge will be in Moscone West, Third Floor, coincidentally right near the Unconference sessions, which should work out well.

So, we’re calling it informal because Rich, Anthony and I will be bouncing in and out during the conference, and we’re expecting other people will want to do the same. This is a chance to hang out with us, rock out some code, bounce ideas off people, work on a specific project, whatever.

This is super last-minute, but Justin has agreed (it’s his lounge). It might crowded at times, but rockstars hackers can work in any kind of conditions, like the Postal Service.

Sound fun, right. But what are we hacking? Here are a few ideas:

Collok
I told you about Collok yesterday, Matt’s side-project. Well, Matt has a list of stuff he’d like to build into Collok, but a shortage of hands. So, if you want to hone your Rails skills, Matt will be there, hacking on Collok. There’s a good change your code could get deployed to Collok users during the conference. Sweet.

OpenSocial Apps
Rich and Anthony will be there as well talking OpenSocial and hacking on our Connect container. Interested in helping or learning about OpenSocial? Stop by our Unconference session Monday at 4 PM, then join in the fun at the hackathon.

Or bring your own project and rally some people to work on it.

The goal here is to hang out and work on some code in a casual atmosphere. Because there’s a conference going on too, people will be coming and going, but I plan to make this my HQ during the conference. So if you just want to chat, stop by the OTN Lounge and find me.

So, join us; we’ll be there Monday through Wednesday. We won’t be there Thursday, but don’t let that deter you from hacking without us.

See you there.

Justin teased this earlier in the month, and today, Oracle Listens took over oracle.com.

I’m glad they overcame the hiccups that initially postponed its launch, and I’m nervously waiting for a flood of email to hit our support distribution list.

If you read here, you’ll remember that we’ve shifted our focus to Connect, our internal social platform skunkworks, and Marketing has been gradually taking over Mix. You’ve probably also noticed the prominance of Mix in the run-up to OpenWorld, culimating with Oracle Listens, which uses Mix as its basis.

Mix has been a hit, and Marketing has taken it to the next level. Membership soared during the suggest a session campaign, and it has continued to rise as OpenWorld looms. The last time I checked, Mix was closing in on 40,000 members, surpassing Paul’s guess back in May.

Ideally, people will use Mix to stay in touch with people they meet at OpenWorld and to collaborate between Oracle IRL events. This is its primary purpose, to join the at large Oracle community.

Oracle Listens uses Mix to: a) collect feedback and b) ensure it’s addressed. If you’re familiar with Mix, you probably already know it collects feedback really well, so it’s the second point that matters. To that point, Marketing has lined up executives to answer feedback through Mix.

So, not only will they listen, but they’ll respond.

As Justin mentions, Oracle Listens is the brainchild of the Marketing Leaders Summit held back in January, and Marketing deserves the credit for turning whiteboard fodder into reality.

A few people, including Charlene Li and Vinnie, were pre-briefed about Oracle Listens during Office 2.0 earlier this month, if you want to read balanced coverage. I’m sure this campaign will draw more feedback, since it’s pretty hard to avoid noticing it.

Kudos to Marius, Tim, Justin, Judy Sim, Karen Tillman and many others in Marketing for making this happen. Oh, and to ENTP for rocking out the code.

Find the comments if you want.

A few weeks ago, I huddled with Matt and Eddie to chat about how we could do some whizzy-social-2.0 stuff for OpenWorld this year.

The outcome was a lot of “this would be cool” and “just don’t have the time”. Well, Matt made some time anyway, and he’s soft-released Collok.com to help you manage your OpenWorld schedule.

I say soft-launched because he has a list of features that aren’t done, and he says the code isn’t there yet. I beg to differ on the latter point; I entered my schedule into Collok yesterday and didn’t see any bugs. Collok supports csv import if you’ve built your schedule using the Schedule Builder.

Apparently employees are not eligible to use the Schedule Builder, so I entered my alerts by hand. Collok stores my schedule for the week and can send me reminders for each alert by SMS, Twitter and email. Pretty handy when you’re on the go, hoofing around the massive conference that is OpenWorld.

Collok is tightly focused on your schedule, at least for OpenWorld. Matt has a list of plans to make it more social, but he has a day job. Here’s his list of features to build:

• Sessions organized into tracks
• Presenters can claim their sessions
• People can say they are attending the session
• A twitter like stream for each session
• People can “check in” to a session via twitter DM and then anything they dm collok for the length of the session automatically gets added to the session’s timeline
• An air app that displays all the incoming msgs on the presenters screen during the session
• Brightkite and FireEagle to push/pull current location
• Create your own sessions / event i.e. unconference and after parties (private and public)
• A map of the events and after parties
• A map of the attendees and their current locations

I like the narrow execution, versus a big splat with a bunch of features that aren’t fully baked yet. If Matt can excute his list of enhancements, Collok will be a powerful social tool for conferences by the time next year’s season begins.

So, if you’re attending OpenWorld, test out Collok as your personal conference assistant. Be gentle though, it’s pre-beta now, and Matt has a duties at OpenWorld to handle too. Of course, if you like it, find him at the conference and pat him on the back.

Maybe he’ll tell you what the significance of the name is. I’d like to know.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

Someone sends an email to a distribution list. Someone replies to all, and people start asking for removal, also replying to all. Snarky comments ensue. Inbox is stuffed with replies to all.

You know the drill.

So, yesterday morning, someone sent an innocuous request to a sales distribution list, asking a very common question, i.e. who manages so-and-so account. What followed was one of the nuttiest mail storms I’ve seen in a long time.

A day and what seems like 200 messages later, it’s finally over, or someone has pulled the plug. This one was different in a couple ways. First, because we use a self-service mail list system, the people asking to be removed were met with the usual responses on how to do that themselves.

However, these people didn’t show as belonging to the lists that we mailed, so they couldn’t remove themselves. Bummer. Oh, and among the many message was one from one of the top executives in the company, asking to stop the insanity.

That didn’t work, and the storm went around the world and back to where it started in the Pacific timezone. There were usual annoyed replies (to all, natch) and the intelligence tests (again, sent to all), along with a nice shouting paragraph of an email.

All this reminded me of a singular pain point we had hoped to address with Connect, i.e. search and complete profiles make these requests moot.

So, if I manage a certain account, all I need to do is add that to my profile in Connect, and anyone who searches for that account name can find me, without spamming the universe.

This use case applies to any size business, and it’s one of many ways a social network can be used for business.

Now for the bad news. The adoption curve hasn’t caught up yet, making this a partial solution. Add to that the path of least resistance problem that leads people to use email as a crutch to find information when they’re strapped for time.

I don’t want to focus on the negatives because this way of sharing information within a company, i.e. by index, rather than query, is the future. In five years, this type of spam should be the subject of wayback jokes.

What do you think? Were you privy to this spam thread? Personally, I found it funny (not ha-ha, but interesting), and I’m always amazed at the irony of these things.

Find the comments and share your thoughts.

Not much is happening this week unrelated to OpenWorld, but Rich pointed me at something fun.

By now, you’re probably familiar with OraTweet, Noel’s side-project turned enterprise communication tool. I’ve blogged about it several times because I dig the garage innovation and it’s a perfect OpenSocial app tie-in to Connect. Most recently, coverage of TC50 winner Yammer earlier this month has drawn comparisons to OraTweet.

So now Rich tells me Noel is running a logo search for OraTweet. Here are the guidelines:

• Upload your logo with a size of 64×64, bigger logos will be displayed at 64×64.
• The logo doesn’t need to be necessarily a bird, but the term “tweet” is becoming a standard when referring to micro blogging messages.
• You can vote at least once for each logo.
• Avoid using copyrighted images, preferably draw it yourself or make sure that the author has released it for public use.

Several worthy submissions already. Rich added a couple, and he and I bounced some non-bird ideas for more logos. I’m wondering why Noel didn’t run the voting on Connect, since we have voting. Maybe it was the lack of file upload, but anyway, I did manage to vote for my favorite “at least once”.

Here are a few of the submissions.

I think Rich is just getting started, and I expect he’ll have some new kickass logo spins very soon.

If you’re an Oracle person, head over to OraTweet and vote. Oh and check out OraTweet if you haven’t yet and feel the Twitter-goodness.

Inspired by Eddie, who blogged his schedule for next week, and others, I decided to wade into the OpenWorld show guide to set up my week.

I had planned to use the Schedule Builder, but I guess that’s not for employees. So, I started combing the Content Catalog and soon got a headache trying to read all the session abstracts.

If you didn’t already know, OpenWorld is always huge, but it looks to be even larger than last year. Anyway, I picked out a few sessions, mostly by people I know IRL or through Intertubes. I have a few Unconference sessions on my list as well.

If you want to meet AppsLab, here’s when and where we’ll be speaking:

Monday
Who: Rich
What: S298819: Building and Deploying Web-Scale Social Networking Applications, Using Ruby on Rails and Oracle Database
When: 1:00 PM-2:00 PM
Where: Marriott Salon 02

Who: Paul and me
What: S299162: Web 2.0 Technologies In the Enterprise: Lessons Learned, Tips, and Tricks from Oracle AppsLab
When: 2:30-3:30 PM
Where: Moscone West, Room 2020

Who: Anthony, Rich and me
What: Unconference: Adventures in OpenSocial
When: 4:00-5:00 PM
Where: Moscone West, 3rd Floor, Overlook II
Tuesday
Who: Rich
What: S298818: Hands-on Lab: Web 2.0 Applications with Ruby/JRuby on Rails and Oracle Database
When: 2:30-3:30 PM
Where: Marriott Golden Gate B1

Wednesday
Who: Me
What: Unconference: Are You Insulting Me? Essential Geek-Speak, FTW!
When: 4:00 PM-5:00 PM
Where: Moscone West, 3rd Floor, Overlook II

I’m going to try to get another time for my geek-speak session onsite because the current time overlaps with Larry’s keynote. Stay tuned for details.

However, I still have lots of time to fill, so I’m crowdsourcing my week. Do you have a session you think I’d like? Or do you know of one that I simply can’t miss? What about after hours meetups and such? I seem to recall a page in the Oracle Wiki for that last year. Find the comments and let me know.

I can’t promise I’ll go, but at least I’ll make an attempt. This year, I’d like to get down to the exhibition floor too. I didn’t get around much last year, and I’m curious to see who’s exhibiting.

We’re not doing any formal AppsLab meetup this year; you can blame that on my laziness, or whatever you like. But I’ll be around Sunday through Wednesday, checking out sessions, networking, tweeting, etc. I’m not sure there’s any formalized way to tweet OpenWorld this year, but I think they’re encouraging use of the hashag #00w08.

Hit me up over Twitter or any number of other ways (IM, email, comments, Facebook) if you want to meet IRL. This is one of the rare occasions when a large portion of the Oracle community at large gathers en masse, and I’d like to meet as many of you as possible.

By the way thanks to Warren and his tip on how to monitor hotel room openings, I’ll be staying within walking distance of the conference, rather than at the airport. So, I’ll have a lot more time for networking, early and often.

So, find the comments and help me fill out my schedule.