Stories about: Sierra

Meet this year's JavaOne spotlight technology, the same as last year's JavaOne spotlight technology.

The Internet has 1.3 billion users, but that's not enough for Lynn St. Amour. As CEO of the Internet Society, she is expanding the nonprofit group, which promotes development of the Internet globally. St. Amour doubled the group's staff in 2007 and beefed up its outreach activities in Africa, South America and Asia in her bid to add another billion Internet users worldwide. National Correspondent Carolyn Duffy Marsan sat down with St. Amour this week at a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force, an ISOC-funded standards group. Here are excerpts from their conversation:

From cautious corporate onlookers trying to gauge how Linux and open-source software fit into enterprise IT systems to the companies now looking to expand their use of open-source applications, a broad swath of IT users are in San Francisco at the annual LinuxWorld Conference & Expo.

Government needs to reflect the changes in communications that have resulted from Web 2.0 technology and help facilitate two-way communication between citizens.

Anyone who has participated in the blogosphere in the past two months knows the troubling story of Kathy Sierra, a prominent blogger who was the victim of online threats that included violent sexual acts and murder. When the harassment spread beyond her own blog to two others that were affiliated with other prominent bloggers, Sierra became so terrified that she canceled an upcoming speaking engagement and took a hiatus from blogging.

When technology publisher Tim O'Reilly released a draft code of blogging conduct earlier this week, he said it was modeled after the community guidelines of BlogHer, a blogging site for women that was launched in January 2006. O'Reilly's draft code, which calls for conforming sites to use a symbol akin to a sheriff's badge stating "civility enforced," urges bloggers to avoid posting content intended to threaten or harass others and to delete comments that contain such content. The code also suggests that bloggers ban anonymous comments and connect privately with commenters when conflicts occur rather than publicly playing out those issues on the blog.

On the heels of the posting of death threats against prominent blogger Kathy Sierra, technology publisher Tim O'Reilly Sunday released a draft code of conduct for blogging that calls for an end to anonymous comments and a commitment to online civility.

Prominent blogger Kathy Sierra cancelled a workshop she was scheduled to give today at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego and suspended her blog because of death threats she received on her blog and threats of violence posted on other blogs, she said.

Open-source database vendor Greenplum had cause for celebration Tuesday, announcing both US$15 million in venture capital financing and the appointment of a new CEO.

Game developer turned author Kathy Sierra is the brain behind best-sellers "Head First Java" and "Head First EJB". During her 17 years in the IT industry, Sierra has worked as a master trainer for Sun Microsystems, founded javaranch.com, and now specialises in metacognition, which is the science of thinking about thinking.

With less than a month before its kick-off, organisers of the world-renowned linux.conf.au will this week announce the final keynote speaker, who is also set to represent a shift in the traditional technical focus of the event.