Jesse Robbin’s experiences as an emergency responder at Hurricane Katrina introduce this piece on mapping tools designed for use during disasters.

“When these sites go away, it’s a sudden loss. It’s like you are standing in the middle of Macy’s and the power goes out. When the thing you depend on to live your daily life suddenly goes away, it’s trauma…These companies have a responsibility to people who rely and depend on them, just as people going over a public bridge expect that the bridge won’t suddenly collapse,” says Velocity cochair Jesse Robbins in Brad Stone’s article on Web sites’ performance.

Teen blogger Daniel Brusilovsky used his first conference media pass to produce great coverage of the introduction of CloudStatus, learn about Device Anywhere, and for some live blogging of the conference’s opening hours.

“Domas Mituzas of MySQL/Sun gave a presentation Monday at the Velocity conference that provided an inside look at the technology behind Wikipedia, which he calls an ‘operations underdog,’” writes Rich Miller.

Stephen Shankland on Google engineer Luis Barroso’s discussion of models servers can use to increase efficiency by lowering power consumption.

Rich Miller covers another major announcement from Velocity.

Rich Miller reports on Bill Coleman’s Velocity keynote, “Sometimes the path to a greener data center happens in small steps that appear obvious but often are left undone.”

Valleywag on Velocity: “If you’re not there right now, show up tomorrow and figure out how to make your site run harder, better, faster, stronger. ”

Datacenter Junkie Michael Halligan summarizes the first morning at Velocity.

Examiner.com includes a great quote from program Jesse Robbins in
this announcement.

Over on the O’Reilly Radar, Velocity co-chair Jesse Robbins notes that two new projects will be launched at the conference: Jiffy and EUCALPYTUS.

The keynote presentation line-up for Velocity has been confirmed, and it looks like an excellent mix of speakers and ideas:

• Bill Coleman (Cassatt Corporation), “Green Data Centers”
• Vik Chaudhary (Keynote Systems, Inc.), “Keynote Systems Launches KITE”
• John Fowler (Sun Microsystems), “Innovation That Drives Opportunity for the Web Infrastructure”
• Javier Soltero (Hyperic, Inc.), “Clouds Are No Substitute for Competence”
• Harald Prokop (Akamai Technologies), “How to Accelerate Non-cacheable, Dynamic Sites Leveraging a Globally Distributed Platform”
• Sean Quinlan (Google, Inc.), “Storage at Scale”

And here’s the full conference schedule.

The inaugural Velocity conference will feature Ignite! on Monday, June 23 at 8:45 p.m. Each of the 16 Ignite! talks will be five minutes long–20 slides at only 15 seconds a slide. There are still a few slots open for cool ideas, hacks, and lessons. If you’d like to share your war stories with a lot of other web performance and ops practitioners, submit a proposal by June 9. Velocity co-chair Jesse Robbins will be accepting and announcing good talks as they come in, with the final lineup posted on June 13. Remember, Ignite Velocity is free and will be open to all.

Adam Jacob joins Velocity program co-chair Jesse Robbins for a discussion around automated infrastructure, iClassify, and Puppet on IT Conversations’ Technometria series with Phil Windley.

Velocity conference co-chair Steve Souders recently participated in a webcast on “Even Faster Web Sites”:

Brady Forrest has posted an entry about one of the co-chairs of Velocity:
“Last week Steve Souders, the author of the O’Reilly book High Performance Web Sites and creator of Firefox plugin YSlow, presented his latest website performance findings at the Web 2.0 Expo.”

Steve Souders, co-chair of Velocity and author of High Performance Web Sites (at one point the #1 selling computer book on Amazon) will explain the Performance Golden Rule, review his performance best practices, and use YSlow to analyze the top web sites in the world. Introducing Steve will be Andy Oram, author, blogger, and senior editor for O’Reilly Media.

This is a free live event taking place Thursday, April 24, 2008 at 17:00 GMT for approximately 45 minutes. Attendance is limited, so register now. We’ll send you a reminder before the webcast. And please feel free to invite your friends and colleagues to join in!

Media partner Programmers Heaven has posted a summary of the conference.

We’ve just heard from program co-chairs Steve Souders and Jesse Robbins that more speakers have been added to the schedule for Velocity, our new web performance and operations conference, including Bill Scott from Netlix on Measuring Performance. The speaker list now includes folks from Microsoft, AOL, Amazon, Sun Microsystems, Mozilla, Farecast, LinkedIn, OpenDNS, plus many others sharing perspectives and expertise.

Brand new to the O’Reilly conference line-up this year is Velocity and we’re excited to be opening up a conversation in this space. Program chairs Steve Souders and Jesse Robbins have just unveiled the preliminary line-up of speakers and sessions, which follow two tracks: Performance and Operations. (Registering by May 5 saves you 350 bucks, too.)

A nice mention in the Config-mgmt mailing list blog regarding Velocity:

Looks like it’s pretty web-site focused, but it should be interesting
for others, too.

Nice Velocity mention….

Still want to know more? If so, you should enlist for O’Reilly media’s planned Velocity conference in San Fransisco June 23-24 next year, which they claim is a first of its kind. In addition to Cal Henderson, Amazon.com and other global web sites will be presenting.

Here’s a mention for our latest conference: Velocity:

O’Reilly has announced a new conference called Velocity. From their front page:

Steve Souders, co-chair blogged about Velocity on Yahoo’s Developer Network:

O’Reilly just announced Velocity, their first conference focused on web performance and operations. It’s scheduled for June 23-24, 2008 at the San Francisco Airport Marriott in Burlingame. I’m proud to say that Jesse Robbins and I are co-chairing Velocity.

Velocity conference co-chair, Jesse Robbins, posted the following:

I’m happy to announce that Steve Souders and I will be co-chairing Velocity, the new O’Reilly conference dedicated to Web Performance and Operations.

Start your engines ladies and gentleman, Velocity 2008 call for participation is officially open!

Velocity Press Release

Tim recently had an O’Reilly Radar post on high performance websites, which includes a discussion on our new conference: Velocity:

We’ve long believed that one of the side-effects of Web 2.0 and the demands of the internet as platform is that more is required of web sites than ever before in terms of availability, performance, and scalability