ReadWriteCloud

Mark Twain said, "a lie is halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on." The speed of putting on boots (if you wear them) hasn't changed much since Twain's day, but lies and misinformation are getting a serious boost out of the Internet. Consider the post about MongoDB that made it all over the Net this weekend thanks to being voted up on Hacker News.

In short, the anonymous Pastebin post slams MongoDB saying "I now feel a kind of social responsibility to deter people from banking their business on MongoDB" and then lists reasons why MongoDB is a bad choice. Sounds like typical HN front-page material, right?

The Monktoberfest conference held yesterday in Portland, Maine was a great success. The first-time developer conference about social, tech and beer delivered all that it promised, and then some.

The conference, organized by RedMonk emphasized the social side of software development. Unlike many conferences that are hard tech or business focused, Monktoberfest focused primarily on the things that make software development a passion and not just a job. And beer, of course.

One key to a good or great talk? Having a good "hook," to interest the audience. Ian Robinson decided that a good way to grab audience attention yesterday at the Strange Loop conference in St. Louis was to use Doctor Who to talk about the Neo4j graph database. He's not wrong.

What could have been an extremely dry and boring presentation was fairly lively. Robinson started with a quick overview of Doctor Who, just in case the audience wasn't familiar with the show. I don't think he needed to have worried, given the demographic.

Keynotes are often viewed skeptically by technical audiences. Far too often conference keynotes are all style and no substance. Larger conferences can be worse – where keynotes are pay to play and audiences are expected to sit through glorified sales pitches. The Strange Loop conference today in St. Louis, Missouri avoided that problem pretty nicely today with its morning keynote by Erik Meijer, "Category Theory, Monads, and Duality in (Big) Data."

Meijer, is an architect in Microsoft's SQL Server division. He was previously an associate professor at Utrecht University, and an adjunct professor at the Oregon Graduate institute. No doubt, he's been spending plenty of time thinking about the differences between SQL and NoSQL databases lately.

We're up to our eyeballs in OSCon stuff this week at ReadWriteWeb, but it's not too early to start thinking about another forthcoming open source related event in Portland, OR: PuppetConf, the annual operations conference hosted by Puppet Labs and others.

As a bonus for our readers, Puppet Labs is giving away three free tickets to ReadWriteWeb. Update: The free tickets are gone.

I am sitting among the SAP influencers at SAP SapphireNow, all excited about what we have been waiting for this week and that's the keynote featuring executive board member Vishal Sikka and SAP Founder Dr. Hasso Plattner.

It's a time to reflect on the network. Millions of people are online with data growing exponentially. But the latency issue is not going away. It's actually getting worse. We talk about always being online but it's clear offline access will be increasingly important. That issue in itself drives demand for in-memory technology. It's Ground Hog day all over again. As Forrester's Paul Hammerman just tweeted: "Expecting detailed discussion of in-memory computing as the future for analytics, transactions and cloud apps from Hasso."

Let's get started.

I stopped by the San Francisco Music Tech Summit late yesterday afternoon. It's the eighth summit and the place was packed.

There are a few reasons for that: Music Hack Day over the weekend, Google I/O tomorrow and - supporting both - a new rising tide of developers who Stephen O'Grady and the Redmonk crew call "The New King Makers."

Paul Lamere of The Echo Nest said in an interview with me yesterday that developers are the music industry's new gatekeepers. Kingmaker or gatekeeper - it's hard to refute the developers strength. Just look at Google - which has chosen Google I/O, a developer conference, to reportedly announce a music locker service.

At dinner the other night, John Squire the chief strategy officer for CoreMetrics told me that his team is building an API and embarking on that windy path in search of the the communities where those elusive programmers can be discovered.

What's a good way to attract developers? That was the basic question Squire posed. It was the end of the day at IBM Impact at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas and I had heard a lot about SOA, cloud standards efforts and the demand for better automation but hardly a word about developers.

Before I left IBM Impact, I took some time to listen to a Forbes pannel session about trends in the corporate world. I asked about the developer equation. How do developers fit in?

In part one of our video series from SXSW we posted our interviews with Oren Michaels of Mashery and Mike Maney of Alcatel-Lucent. In part two, we have three interviews to show you.

John Musser of Programmable Web discusses how APIs are helping solve the issues that come with a fragmented device market. Sam Ramji of Apigee discusses how programming is coming to everything from weight scales to tractors. And Matt Galligan of SimpleGeo discusses the issue of dominance in the API space by companies such as Google and Facebook.

Spiceworks CEO Scott Abel sat next to me at dinner last Saturday night during SXSW. We were at Porter Finn, a restaurant in the Hilton, right in the center of the action for the annual event in Austin.

Our conversation turned to Steve Jobs. Abel worked at NeXT Software under Jobs and during his time there, Jobs shared his belief that "Good is the enemy of great." Jobs meant that true greatness is hard to achieve because good enough is usually what people are satisfied in producing. Achieving greatness takes far more time to accomplish. But are those who are "great" the only people who influence others?

SXSW is an event for influencers. Startups compete for everyone's attention. People are in a constant state of movement, trying applications, monitoring the conversation and adding their own insights as they listen to their colleagues in the panels and at the parties.