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Cloud was still probably the most talked about topic this week at OSCon. Cloud computing is still in the process of changing the way we work and do business, but let's face it: many vendors and consultants are overhyping the benefits, and a lot of us are just getting a bit tired of hearing the word "cloud." Cloud hype's not going away any time soon, but we can at least vent a little about some of the particular technologies we think are exaggerated. Which one irks you the most?

OSCON, O'Reilly's annual convention devoted to everything open source, kicked off in Portland, Oregon this morning. The day will finish with OSCON Ignite. Ignite is the event series, born and bred by geeks, where speakers are limited to five minutes and 20, auto-advancing slides. Tonight's session tites include The Bad Touch, Barehanded Music Making and The Diabolical Developer. Full lists of sessions is below along with the video stream.

Online dating services promise you help finding your "perfect match." Complete your profile, answer a series of questions, choose a few filters as you search and you're given a list of singles in your area who are most likely to be a suitable date.

But providing these search results is no easy task. It isn't simply a matter of identifying the right people based on a single user's dating criteria. The people whose profiles are returned in the results should also, in turn, "like" the person who's searching. In other words, the matching has to occur at both ends.

Today at the opening keynote of OSCON's new Data sub-conference, OKCupid's CTO Tom Quisel spoke about how the online dating service has built its architecture in order to handle these queries. As Quisel notes, the types of searches that OKCupid users conduct are different than those done via other search engines. After all, "Web pages don't have personal preferences."

I spent much of the week at OSCON, which served in part as a very visual reminder for something that is always on the back of my mind: the absence of women in tech. While women make up 25% of those who work in the tech industry, they comprise only 1% of those in open source. And wandering around the halls of the Portland Convention Center with thousands of men and a handful of women, I was both frustrated and depressed by the statistic and its reality.

OSCON has wrapped in sunny Portland, and with it the most ambitious conference wireless networking I've ever seen. Yet even here I heard attendees complaining about sluggish Wi-Fi... and organizers asking them not to download large files.

Now, there's little question that OSCON is an edge case. Get a few thousand developers and software engineers together and you're going to strain the bandwidth.

We'll be doing a live stream from OSCON, talking to the people here who want to answer our tough questions. :)

The stream will be live at 2:30 p.m. PST.

The first interviews today are with folks from Mashery, Twilio and Mindtouch. Stop by if you'd like to talk or do an interview.

If you are here at OSCON, we are at the small tables by Starbucks, facing the entrance to the Oregon Convention Center.

The open cloud is dominating discussions that we are having with people at OSCON. And over the past week, that conversation online has accelerated as the conference approached.

Open cloud computing is a big topic. At a granular level, we are hearing lots of talk about the rise of "DevOps," and "NoSQL". Topics like open government, APIs and standards are surfacing in panels, keynotes and hallway discussions.

Portland, Oregon-based Puppet Labs, commercial sponsor of the open-source server configuration framework Puppet, announced today that it has secured a $5 million Series B funding round, led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Existing investors True Ventures and Radar Partners also contributed, bringing Puppet Labs' total funding to date to over $7 million.

This round of funding will help the company build its engineering team and build on its growth in the enterprise.

We are thinking of how to get the most out of CloudCamp at OSCON on Monday night as the discussions will be exclusively about open-source and the cloud.

So we decided why not write down some topics that we'd like to explore. These are in no particular order but just generally what we are thinking about. A lot of these questions come from trends and topics of discussion we are seeing on the Web.

More than 70 major companies, academic institutions and high profile technologists have launched a campaign to educate US government agencies about the benefits of open source technology. Announced earlier at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, groups such as Google, RedHat, Novell, Linux, Mozilla, Sun Microsystems and the Electronic Frontiers Foundation have teamed up to create Open Source For America. The joint effort is a coalition aimed at lobbying the US Federal government to consider using open-source software over proprietary code. O'Reilly Media CEO Tim O'Reilly and Executive Director of the Linux Foundation Jim Zemlin are just some of the board advisors.