I have mixed feelings about the current arrangement of Twitter widgets at TheAquarium. I like that they help me track conversations and discover news and opinions but the widget takes some time to load and too often the content is blank - I assume infrastructure problems, which they now have money to fix. A reader recently complained about the widgets and I promised to collect feedback via a survey. So, if you care about the widgets, one way or the other, please go fill in this 3-question Survey...

Today is the 5th anniversary of the Pat's first post at BSC and I want to thank everybody that made that happen. BSC has given us a tool that we have used (and abused) to communicate directly with many audiences, internal and external. In the case of GlassFish, we started using BSC extensively back in late 2005 and things quickly started improving. TheAquarium in particular has been a heavy user of BSC: we have 2741 entries and are translated into 8 editions!

Other bloggers are also celebrating the anniversary, see for example, Jim's recollection, or go check on the bsc5years tag.

I've added SlideCasting to the recordings of the TheAquarium Online shows. The first 3 presentations are from last week's OpenSSO Overview, Adoption and Roadmap presentation; see, for example, the OpenSSO Roadmap by Sidharth Mishra. SlideShare.Net provides a nice tool to create these SlideCasts but every format adds to the time I spend on this, so I am considering dropping a format or two. Please consider visiting this Doodle Poll to vote for your favorite formats.

Marcelo Souza has started a Brazilian Portuguese edition of TheAquarium. With this addition we will have 7 editions: Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Spanish. Alexis is planning a french edition and I am going to restart the spanish edition. Please let us know if you are interested in additional editions; due to logistical reasons related to how authoring is managed at Blogs.Sun.Com we can only easily leverage help from Sun employees, but that includes Sun Campus Ambassadors.

Sun USA shuts down between Christmas and New Year, so we are going to add a few extra days at each end and we will take a break from now until Jan 4th. Time to recharge batteries, read a few books, clean house, play a few games (virtual and otherwise), celebrate the holidays and be with the family... It's been a very busy and rewarding year for all of us; our best wishes to all of you, and hope to see you next year.

This week was the tenth "webinar" at TheAquarium Online - or 32, if you count each of the GFv3 Prelude Launch Event presentations separately.

The full set of presentations is: OSGi Overview WebSynergy Grizzly and Grizzly 2 EJB 3.1 SocialSite and OpenSocial Many Languages, One Machine GFv3 Prelude Overview in Spanish GFv3 Prelude Special Event Scripting in GFv3 Prelude Seam and GlassFish

The format of the event has evolved over time and I'm now selecting a topic and then arranging a set of several shorter presentations and/or speakers around it (like with Seam and GlassFish). We record all the presentations and publish the slidedecks and screencasts. I think the arrangement is working well; but we are always interested in your comments. felt

Also, if you have suggestions for topics, please add them as comments to the Ideas and Suggesions page in our Wiki.

The Online-based Webinars are working pretty well. We will continue to fine-tune and improve the mechanics, but we are already lining up a full schedule. The next two presentations are: • Sep 25th, 2008 - Grizzly and Grizzly 2.0, JFA and Aleksei, Tentative • Oct 2nd, 2008 - EJB 3.1 Overview, Ken Saks, Confirmed Full schedule details are at GlassFish TV Schedule. Non-Sun presenters are very welcome.

PS. Stay tuned for other online chats around our GlassFish v3 Prelude launch next month.

James Falkner and Prashant Dighe will give an Overview of WebSynergy TODAY (Thursday) - 11am PT, Sept 11th, 2008. You can join us via a concall (free if in the US, caller-paid overseas) or online via TheAquarium @ uStream.TV. For more details check out the OverviewOfWebSynergy page at the TheAquarium wiki. The plan (with the usual comment about mice and men) is to record the presentation. Updated Slides are available now at the wiki page.

James Falkner and Prashant Dighe will give an Overview of WebSynergy Thursday morning - 11am PT, Sept 11th, 2008. You can join us via a concall (free if in the US, caller-paid overseas) or online via TheAquarium @ uStream.TV. For more details check out the OverviewOfWebSynergy page at the TheAquarium wiki. The plan (with the usual comment about mice and men) is to record the presentation.

Richard Hall (of Apache Felix fame) will give an Introduction and Overview of OSGi tomorrow morrning - 11am PT, Wed 20th, 2008. You can join us via a concall (free if in the US, caller-paid overseas) or online via TheAquarium @ uStream.TV. For more details check out the IntroAndOverviewToOSGi page at the TheAquarium wiki. The plan (with the usual comment about mice and men) is to record the presentation.

I will tag similar entries with See GlassFishTV.

You may have noticed a new author at TheAquarium: Giuseppe Maxia, The Data Charmer, a long time member of the MySQL community team. Giuseppe also writes at (@Blogspot, @Blogs.Sun.Com) and will help us cover the happenings in the MySQL community. A very warm welcome, Giuseppe! Andi and James will also start posting to the TheAquarium soon and Arun has also resumed his contributions. This should help with our coverage of topics - and will return me some of my free time!

There are users of GlassFish technologies all around the world (GeoMap) and I want to explore how to use a technology like UStream.TV to reach out and build a better connected, more effective, global community. Check out the Ideas on TheAquarium TV and please provide feedback and/or additional suggestions; TIA.

This year CommunityOne is going to include live streaming of the sessions. The technology is uStream.TV and it worked very well for me when I tested it earlier. I've been looking for something like this for a couple of years and, if it goes well today, I have plans to use it for live events (already created the TA Channel). Today's CommunityOne channels will be at uStream.TV/channel. Check it out and let us know how it works for you.

Thanks to Jorge Sanchez we have restarted El Acuario, the spanish translation of TheAquarium. If you are a Sun employee, including a Campus Ambassador, and want to help Jorge, please contact him. We think we have also figured out a way where anybody in the community, including non-Sun employees, can help with the translations, using a new TheAquarium Wiki. It is an experiment but we think it can work; contact Jorge or me if you are interested in exploring this, either for Spanish or for other languages - like Portuguese!

Thanks to May Zhang, there is now a Korean Translation of TheAquarium; thanks! The complete list now includes: • English (main) • Japanese • Chinese • Russian • Korean • Spanish (not up-to-date)

I have offers to help with the Spanish edition and to start a Portuguese one; stay tuned.