2 jam packed days of technology talks

Tags:
• creative commons
• django
• facebook
• gears
• google
• merb
• microformats
• mozilla
• opensocial
• OpenSource
• openweb
• PHP
• Rails
• ria
• semantic
• ubuntu
• Web
• xml
• xul

Are you 13-18? Want to learn more about open source software development using projects like Drupal by completing some fun tasks? Then Google has a project for you: The Google Highly Open Participation Contest! Check out Drupal.org's GHOP Contest page and join today. Complete one task and you get a t-shirt. Complete 3 and you get $USD 100. And this real world open source experience will look great on a college or university application or even a internship application!

Not 13-18? No problem. Drupal needs your help to mentor the students with their tasks. Just sign up as a mentor .

Here's the scoop from Google's website:

Wow. 20 projects accepted for Drupal for the 2007 version of Google Summer of Code. Thanks to all the mentors and especially top GSoC wranglers Robert Douglass and Angie Byron for herding us through this application process.

Not only did this pay off in 20 projects, but the folks that help host drupal.org at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab *also* got two projects accepted which are actually working with Drupal: integrating the Google API into Drupal.

There are some really great projects planned out. Here are some of my favourites:

• RSS / Atom integration: I spent an hour or two with some of the guys from Achieve Internet last week on scoping some patches for the core aggregator code...there is lots of work to be done here, and I think we can get far, fast, by doing a bit of coordination
• Jabber / XMPP: yay! my two favourite communities continue to collide
• Scalability, Load Balancing, and High Availability: Vancouver local hadsie got in, which is great; Scott, want to work out of the Bryght offices for the summer?
• SMS Framework: it's clear that mobile users are continuing to become first class citizens of the web, but that SMS is a great tool for easily integrating into virtually any mobile environment; can I hear the phrase "Twitter clone"?

We've long been recommending Google Apps for your domain as a great email and calendaring solution. Further integration with Google's APIs has been "on the list", and now that Google has announced their Premier Edition, it looks like they're rolling out official ways to extend and integrate with the Google platform.

The Premier Edition is pricey (not expensive: it's in line with costs for big, Enterprise scale applications and support) at $50US/user account/year. How can open source work with this system? Can only the Premier Edition be extended with partner solutions? We'll be following this quite closely and looking at how our favourite open source project, Drupal, can work with these new Google features.

I've written a bit more about this topic over at my personal blog.

I'm looking forward to the Google "Behind the scenes" presentation put on by the Vancouver HPC Users Group (note: not a permalink; added to Upcoming.org). It's being given by Narayanan Shivakumar ('Shiva'), a Google Distinguished Entrepreneur and the founding Director of the Google Seattle-Kirkland R&D center. The abstract is as follows:

Google deals with large amounts of data and millions of users. We'll take a behind-the-scenes look at some of the distributed systems and computing platform that power Google's various products, and make the products scalable and reliable.

The bio says that Shiva is currently "excited about a variety of search and webcrawling technologies (including Google Sitemaps)".

I see the challenge for Google and all search engines to be "how to search the live web". One of the things I often explain is that I firmly believe that all static web pages will eventually be replaced by dynamic web pages. Another way to say this is that much of the content on the web, especially much of it which is being updated often, is actually being created by web apps.

For web apps, URLs are nothing more than keys to content. Type in www.domain.com/about, and the underlying web application will look up the content that is keyed to that URL. In fact, that "about" string is nothing more than a query to the underlying content "engine" of a website.

What is Google and other search engines? They are a centralized aggregator of all the unique queries of all the web apps that run websites in the world. Increasingly, they are having trouble keeping up.