Learning to Dog-Paddle

Yep, I'm officially in over my head.Ross Bates sent me an email last night suggesting some ways that I could begin to frame/think about potential gluecon topics. The email began with the "SQL vs. NoSQL" debate, which I, in my nearly complete state of ignorance, had never even *heard* of -- and then moved up a level to general topics. [Note: if you're not familiar with the "NoSQL" question - fear not. I'll be highlighting it more as I dig in. Just know for now that "NoSQL" stands for "not only SQL" and is really about the different kinds of distributed cloud databases that are being worked on to handle data at internet scale.]In any case, I wanted to post the framework that Ross sent me, and add to it (ie, any mistakes below should be attributed to me making additions), so that folks can get a better sense of the size of the "gluecon space." Assume that everything below is a hugely incomplete list (ie, put "etc" after everything).API's & Protocols: twitter, facebook (both Connect and Tornado), myspace, websockets, pubsubhubbub, XMPPLanguages/Frameworks: JQuery, Zend, Ruby/Rails, Git, Django, Dojo, Scala/LiftFormats/Standards: RDF/Linked Data, JSON, Microformats, HTML5Open Data: DBPedia, Geonames, Data.gov, AWS Public Data Sets, Open Street Map, Open Calais, Alchemy APIPlatforms/Providers: Amazon, Rackspace, Goog App Engine, Heroku, EucalyptusStorage: SQL, NoSQL (Cassandra, CouchDB, MongoDB, Riak, Voldemort, Dynomite, Sherpa, Pig, Hadoop, Drizzle, etc)Identity: OAuth, OpenID, WRAP, SAML, InfoCards, SPMLAnd then a whole bunch of stuff that I don't know where to put, like Mulesoft, Kynetx, SPDY, Salmon, webhooks, etc.I know there are a lot of "cloud" experts out there that can lay out the "stack" (infrastructure, platform, service) and walk us through the "move to the cloud," but you'll notice from the above list (i hope) that we're digging *just* a bit deeper than that. We're trying to look at the platforms, APIs, protocols, standards, storage, identity and connectors that actually glue together all of these web applications, data, people and networks.The expanse before us is huge. As Ross points out, fitting it in two days of conference should prove next to impossible. But hey, we're gonna try. In the meantime, as I drown in information, I'll be learning to dog-paddle.Send me thoughts, ideas, talking points, and keynote suggestions. And be sure to register.