What made Marie Digby? I’ve heard about her on the radio from time to time, while I do the unnatural act of driving somewhere. Now, I’ve been invited to an event, where the tagline says that she’s “a star born from YouTube”. I had to dig further.

Decided to watch the famous video. Its just her, sitting with her guitar, performing an acoustic version of Rihana’s Umbrella. Nothing fancy. I’m told she sat in front of her MacBook to make the “hit”.

Grassroots marketing? Bands try much harder, and still feel the pain of becoming somewhat famous. What makes her different? Beauty (she’s of Japanese-American heritage)? Sultry look?

I wonder what her tipping point was. …

Not long ago I returned from Mobile Monday Melbourne, and this month I got to see Manny Christophidis from Streamezzo give a talk about what they do. Being my first Mobile Monday event, I had a great amount of fun and learning, and found out that many used MySQL in their work, sometimes passively without even knowing what database sat below them.

Surprised I was, to learn that this event had been going on for nearly two years. If you’re not in the mobile space, you tend to miss out on this not-very-well advertised event, I guess. Seeing as there are more mobile phones being sold these days than personal computers, I think this space is going to get even larger in time to come.

Back to Streamezzo. They make mobile clients, that are really lightweight (100kb Java, and about 200kb Symbian), that …

The MySQL community is just great. I’ve been suggesting that we get recordings for the Conference & Expo, alas, its generally not in the roadmap. I mean, look at Apple and their WWDC - all attendees get amazing video recordings that switch between slides and the speaker. Last year, they even delivered it via iTunes! In previous years, they distributed DVDs (valuable, though with WWDC a lot is generally new technology announcements, and I can hardly want to reference what was cool for Panther or Tiger any longer…) Mad props also to the linux.conf.au 2007 team, who also did amazing recordings - sessions were available by the evening they were given!

The MySQL conference is a lot different. There are lots of reusable sessions. Some that you attend, you’ll get knowledge committed for life. The tendency to not see too many roadmap talks makes it very useful for future reference.

Back to why the community rocks. …

Don’t know how many of you actually have heard of, or use, Mugshot, but I just started playing with it after a long hiatus, and decided that it’s pretty cool. Something the MySQL community will probably enjoy being part of (currently, to take full advantage, you want to be a Linux or Windows XP user).

By virtue of looking for the next new community hangouts, I figure we create a MySQL Mugshot Group. And before folk wonder what Mugshot’s all about, I suggest reading the feature list. Keep in mind that Mugshot is completely open source, and its a very live social experience, in this “notification era”. Its a whole lot of fun, and from what I can tell, the signups are now open to the public so what’s keeping you?

The site has i386 …