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.

TheAquarium is the main news blog for activities in the (larger) GlassFish community. The main edition is in English and different groups of Sun employees volunteer to translate it into Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish and Korean. Most of these editions track the english edition fairly well, but the Spanish version is currenly lagging, so... If you are a Sun employee interested in helping (Campus Ambassadors qualify!) please let us know at theaquarium at sun dot com. We are also interested in starting a new Portuguese edition. Same constraints, same contact point.

We have such a high volume of posts at TheAquarium that sometimes I worry that key announcements will not be noticed, even with the help of the FrontPage tag. We have talked off and on about addressing this through a weekly and Rich even automated it for a while; I'm now going to try it again. The plan is that every Sunday I'll post a brief entry with the highlights for the week. The weeklies need to be very brief to be sustainable and to avoid information overload. What makes an entry notable is subjective and time-sensitive and this is an experiment, so please bear with me while I figure how to do this.

Today is the first weekly highlight; the feed for the stream is here.

Given the Worlwide Adoption of GlassFish we have several translations of TheAquarium. The Russian translation has Increased Readership Recently; I think that is because it tracks well the English version and, now, thanks to Ogino, so is the Japanese Translation.

We are going to try to reactivate the Spanish and Chinese translations, and I am still interested in a translation to Portuguese, so let me know if you want to help. For logistic reasons at Blogs.Sun.Com it is much easier to do this for Sun employees, but contact me in any case if you are interested in helping with the translations.

The russian edition of TheAquarium (TheAquarium(ru)) seems to have been gaining readership recently.

Congratulations to eugene, katya, alexface and the rest (who am I missing?) - they are doing an outstanding job keeping up with the constant stream of posts! The Japanese, Spanish and Chinese versions are falling behind, let us know if you are willing to help with the translations.

A number of GlassFish-related blogs are showing strong readership. Doing a pass through the top blogs@BSC right now I see other "friends and relatives", including Miles to Run, Bistro, The Portal Post and The Clingan Zone. Check them out!

So we've just passed entry #1500 in less than two years (that's 2% of the entire BSC btw). We'd like to take this opportunity to thank you for reading The Aquarium but also to ask you what you'd like to see improved. We're still in learning mode (and don't really expect to leave it). Thanks!

We are trying out a 3-column layout for TheAquarium. Let us know if you see any unexpected presentation glitches in your OS/Browser.

We started TheAquarium on Nov 30th, 2005. Some time after that I wrote a Brief Guide to TheAquarium, but over time (and over 1160 entries), the format has changed, so time for a quick update.

The biggest change is a big reduction and a reinterpretation of categories and the adoption of tags. Items are now placed on the category that most closely matches the community that generate them, while we are using tags quite aggressively to cluster the items themselves. The most popular tags are found on the right hand side of the blog pages; a full list can be found at the Search Tools page.

Tags can be used to retreive News and Feeds, and multiple tags can be used. The structure of the URLs was standarized in Roller 3.1 (see Roller Wiki Proposal); here is a cheatsheet:

•  TheAquarium WebLog - http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium
•  Corresponding RSS feed - http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/feed/entries/rss
•  Entries for a given category http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/category/OpenSSO
•  Corresponding RSS feed - http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/feed/entries/rss?category=OpenSSO
•  Entries with given tags - http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/tags/glassfish+adoption
•  Corresponding RSS feed - http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/feed/entries/rss?tags=glassfish+adoption
•  A specific entry - http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/entry/shoal_is_out
•  Entries for a given month - http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/date/200511
•  Entries for a given day - http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/date/20051205

We use the tag frontpage to indicate news that are specially worthy. For example, here is a feed to all the front page news about glassfish. Note you may encounter some old entries that have not been tagged properly yet as we are converting them to tags lazily.

Feeds are available in both RSS and Atom formats. The examples above use RSS but to get the Atom feeds just replace rss with atom in the URLs.

Finally, you may want to also track our new blog on Adoption Stories (corresponding RSS feed).

Added:

•  Feed on all comments: http://blogs.sun.com/main/feed/comments/rss
•  Feed on TheAquarium comments: http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/feed/comments/rss

TheAquarium covers many topics and, although some of our readers may be interested in all these, others will not. Categories do not really work, because the entries typically fall under multiple categories, but tags should fit perfectly. Linda just reported that Tagging will Soon be Available to blogs.sun.com, so expect us to start using them soon after that. This new functionality will enable us to tag news according to importance and scope, which opens new uses of our feeds. For example, interested NetBeans users should be able to link a subfeed from TheAquarium into their welcome screen.

The Aquarium is now being linked from many places and there has been a substantial increase in visitor traffic. This entry is a brief guide to The Aquarium. Some of the visitors may not be familiar with the blog machinery; if so, the next paragraphs provide the basics. Those visitors familiar with blogs may want to jump directly to the details specific to The Aquarium.

A Blog (or weblog) is a website that is a journal of entries that are posted through time. That "log over time" aspect is reflected in many places, for example all entries have a publication time and almost all blogs have a calendar that shows which dates have entries and allows the visitor to navigate through time.

The content of a blog varies widely; its perspective may be political, personal, topical, or any of many others. Most blogs have a single author, but it is not uncommon for an individual to have more than one blog. Some blogs are authored by a group that shares responsibility for the entries.

The entries in a blog create one or more streams of events; the events are described in one of several XML-based formats (several versions of RSS 1.0 or Atom) transported over HTTP. The existance of these streams allows the creation of readers, aggregators, and many other tools.

It is not possible to summarize all the aspects of Blogs, other longer descriptions include the Wikipedia and many others, like here, here and here.

The Aquarium is a group blog authored by several editors; the editors have their own blogs (Carla, Eduardo and Rich) and we share writing the entries in The Aquarium. The Aquarium collects news from the GlassFish Community on multiple topics. The list of topics is growing but it currently includes Open Source, Application Servers, Java EE 5, J2EE, Web Services, XML, Java WSDP, AJAX, Databases and Blueprints. The Aquarium is not intended to be comprehensive, but we try to highlight the most interesting activity we find. You can always give us tips at theaquarium at sun dot com

Like most blogs, The Aquarium is intended for repeat visitors. The content changes continuously and at any given time only the most recent blogs are shown in the front page. You can navigate to some date in the past using the calendar page: click on the date, or use the arrows to move to another month. We are averaging between 3 and 5 entries per day, which quickly builds up volume; the search buttom in the right side bar provides search within the blog; unfortunately this is broken right now, please bear with us while we track the problem. The right side bar also provides quick links into some popular entries.

Entries in The Aquarium are assigned to a category; each category provides an RSS feed. The Aquarium is using Roller 2.0, which supports group blogging but does not yet support tags; this means a given entry cannot be in more than two categories. We are manually tagging the entries and will transition to real tag support when it shows up in Roller.

Most entries in The Aquarium provide highlights and comments on other sources; a few (like this one) are original to this blog. We are tracking blogs as well as forums and mailing lists.

The editors of The Aquarium are Sun employees, in part because we are using Blogs.Sun.Com and in part just because we knew each other. That may change in the future, but in the meantime we are trying to address the interests of the wider GlassFish community. GlassFish already has a number of non-Sun contributors, most prominently Oracle's contribution to Java Persistence, and we are actively trying to report on interesting news regardless of source.

We hope you will find The Aquarium useful. You can always reach us with tips and suggestions at theaquarium at sun dot com.

Update - Check the original launch announcement and a brief recap of the first month.

This one falls in the FYA (for your amusement) category... Our weblog got aggregated into the Best Reviews Center for Aquarium. I looked around a bit and I could not figure out the site. It seems to be mostly automated, and, if so, we are likely to show up there again in the future :-).