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Ubuntu has enjoyed fantastic success over the past few years, becoming one of the dominant Linux distributions, and the distribution of choice for netbooks. Jono Bacon's job is to make sure that that success continues, by keeping the huge Ubuntu developer community happy and productive. We caught up with Jono in advance of his appearance at OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, and he was more than happy to talk about the efforts underway to not only improve the Ubuntu community, but also bring together other communities, such as Gnome and KDE, to help them work better together. Jono officially works for Canonical, a company founded by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth for the promotion of Ubuntu and other free software projects. Read more.

Earlier this year, while Michael Milton was in the early stages of developing Head First Data Analysis (publishing later this month), we brought him to Cambridge to meet with the Head First editorial team for a focused training session. Our primary goal was to help crank out storyboards for chapters of Michael's book, but in the process, we further refined our thinking about the purpose and process for the Learner's Journey [1] to help get us there. Read more.

The New York Times and National Public Radio invite you to their first Media Mashup session at OSCON. Spend the afternoon with the developers who built the Times APIs and NPR APIs. Build your own mashup to share with the group, or just hang out. "And we don't want to just talk about code in the abstract, so in order to seed discussions, spark coding adventures, and just plain have fun, we're sharing some of the things we've built," writes New York Times blogger Derek Gottfrid. So go to Media Mashup at OSCON and share your creative ideas about the future of news and information.

Guest blogger Josh Clark, the author of Best iPhone Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders, offers his tips for managing a mountain of iPhone apps. "A healthy collection of iPhone apps calls for an equally healthy hygiene regimen for your iPhone," says Josh. "Here are a few pointers for keeping your apps tidy and your data safe." Read more.

At last week's Personal Democracy Forum I had a conversation with someone working for a city (I won't say which city), who was tasked with opening up that city's data. We were talking about the Apps for Democracy contests held recently in Washington D.C., and he explained his feeling about them: "There were some interesting apps in there, but overall they didn't meet with the mayor's agenda for the city." Read more.

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• Cloud Computing: The Next Frontier for Open Source
• 10 Ways to Wreck Your Database
• Automated Unit Testing with the Palm Mojo SDK
• Security Monitoring
• Hands-on: Step-by-step MySQL Clustering Setup

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Web technologies often allow you to scale things that weren't scalable before. Unfortunately, that list of scalable things includes spam. From unsolicited phone calls to unwanted emails to unnecessary tweets, it can seem like we're getting progressively overloaded with information we don't necessarily want. One group blamed for the increase in online spam are Twitter bots - Twitter accounts created... Read more.

There's a persistent perception that open source software is being ignored in the enterprise, that they fear it and it ends up being more costly to deploy than proprietary solutions. That's certainly the perception that some major software vendors would like you to have. But it's Jeffrey Hammond's job to dispel those perceptions, at least when they aren't accurate. As an analyst for Forrester Research, Hammond covers the world of software development as well as Web 2.0 and rich internet applications, so he sees how open source is being used on a daily basis. He'll be speaking at OSCON, O'Reilly's Open Source Conference, talking about the true cost of using open source, and he gave us a sample of what's going on in the enterprise at the moment. Read more.

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In my last blog, I discussed the U.S. Clean Energy and Security Act that passed the House and is now up for debate in the Senate. Legislation of this kind is key to understanding future technology trends and requirements, particularly around Green Tech. For example, its passage could spur greater investment in teleconferencing technologies, accelerate smart grid projects and increase interest in building automation tools. Why? Read more.