Next Thursday (September 3, 13:00 UTC), we'll resume MySQL University sessions after the summer break with Reggie Burnett, head of Connector/NET development, giving a session on new features in Connector/NET 6.1.

For MySQL University sessions, point your browser to this page. You need a browser with a working Flash plugin. You may register for a Dimdim account, but you don't have to. (Dimdim is the conferencing system we're using for MySQL University sessions. It provides integrated voice streaming, chat, whiteboard, session recording, and more.) All MySQL University sessions are recorded, that is, slides and voice can be viewed as a Flash movie (.flv). You can find …

About three weeks from now, Rickard Falkvinge (founder of the Pirate Party) will be kicking off the Vancouver Open Web Conference. He’ll be presenting a keynote on how, in just three years, a party with an odd name organized around a narrow electronic frontier platform has become the fourth largest political party in Sweden. It’s an amazing story that makes a good parable about how the world is changing and is a fitting start for a conference that we’ve (meaning mostly Jeff Griffiths, Malcolm van Delst, Mike Cantelon and Tim Whiteway) worked hard to make a careful balance of accessible, …

Mozilla, the global community behind the Firefox web browser, has an idea that we need your help with. We want you to help make openness, participation and distributed decision-making common experiences in Internet life.

To do this, millions of people around the world must understand, embrace and share these values. You, me, our families, our neighbor down the street, our political representatives – millions of us from every walk of life in every wired country can help to protect the Net and make it better.

As an experiment working towards this goal, I am coordinating a program that asks people to share short (very, very short – 3 to 12 second) video statements of how the Net has changed their life. We hope that thousands of videos are made by people all over the world and that, through …

« Post 3 | This is the 4th post in my MoFo Futures 2009 blog series

“When I was a child, my mother lectured me on the evils of ‘gossip.’ She held a feather pillow and said, ‘If I tear this open, the feathers will fly to the four winds, and I could never get them back in the pillow. That’s how it is when you spread mean things about people.’ For me, that pillow is a metaphor for Wikipedia.” — John Seigenthaler Sr.

So the future pulled up in her shiny big metaphor and we got in. In the beginning, our road trip made sense, all well-ordered highways and wholesome roadside attractions. Somewhere along the way, we hit bat country and the …

I want you to tell me the story of how you got started with the Net.

Tell me how your passion was sparked and why it keeps coming to full flame.

Tell me why the Net matters to you, even after all of the long days, short nights and wrecked weekends.

I’ve been writing my story because I need to understand why I care deeply for what the Net is and what it means.

I want to read your story for the same reason.

Don’t hold out on me now. I can see your data trails in my server logs: a few hundred of you trudging in from RSS subscriptions, the PHP, Mozilla and MySQL planets, Boris’ …