Need to tag your content? Use Open Calais

Tom Tague presented Open Calais to our Semantic Web Meetup in L.A. last night. If you need to tag your content, or pull semantically meaningful data AUTOMATICALLY, use Open Calais, API key needed. There is a WordPress plugin called Tagaroo. I wish I could install it here but it doesn’t work on wordpress.com (yet?).

The technology is damn impressive. Thanks to Marco for setting it up all the way from New York and Krista for all her hard work and the pizza of course!

Just for fun I’m going to run this post through the Open Calais demo and see the results. Watch for it in the comments.

How Open Calais tagged this post

Slides are in for Franck Leveneur’s MySQL Stored Procedures presentation

Franck Leveneur gave a nice tutorial on MySQL stored procedures and functions at Yahoo! on Tuesday and the slides are now in: HTML, PDF.

Navicat and ZManda offered license and discounts to attendees, and since we didn’t have a bowl to put everyone’s name in, Franck did a “SELECT * FROM participant ORDER BY rand() LIMIT 1;” to obtain the winner 🙂

PHP Meetup @ Mahalo was great, MySQL tonight

The Mahalo PHP Meetup was a lot of fun. Firstly, Sharon Levy had a great presentation with cool sound effects. That definitely gets your attention…

It’s always good to watch the best techniques presenters use to engage the audience, and not being afraid to play some mood music is definitely one to add to your bag of tricks.

Another cool tip is what I saw Tim Ash do at SES NY a year ago. Bribing. Ask tough questions and offer $10 to the person with the correct answer. Think the audience members were dozing off by the second question? I think NOT!

After Sharon’s presentation, the group stuck around about 7 hours(!) to chat and watch the web shows Mahalo put on. Jason Calacanis with Kevin Rose on This Week in Tech, followed by LeVar Burton and Samm Levine on Kevin Pollak’s very first web show.

On top of it, Mahalo bought plenty of pizza and refreshments to keep the crowd well fed 🙂 Pictures here.

Up tonight, Franck Leveneur‘s talk @ Yahoo! sounds like it will be very enlightening to the MySQL crowd.

Meetup founder auctioning Cloud.com at Cloud Computing Platform

Scott Heiferman, CEO of Meetup, is going to auction off Cloud.com. It’s a fantastic name and the perfect place to sell it.

If IBM buys Sun, look for more tech layoffs

The Wall Street Journal reports that IBM is in talks to buy Sun for $7 billion dollars. I don’t know Sun’s numbers, but $7 billion seems a bit low to me considering the $1 billion dollar Sun purchase of MySQL AB.

In the comments section, Richard Gordon said this:

All I know as a former IBM employee is that they have been in talks before and nothing happened. Plus get ready for huge layoffs if the deal does happen. IBM pSeries boxes have been kicking Sun’s butt for a while now, and the costs of maintaining 2 operating systems, or merging them together will drag on earnings and customers buying for some time. You also risk the loss of many customers to HP if/when the losing operating system is declared.

Considering the previous layoffs, this would be some more bad news for the economy indeed. Maybe not so bad for the MySQL side of the business to have the Big Blue Sun selling it though.