This weekend, 150+ people assembled at the MIT Stata Center in Cambridge for the first-ever Design4Drupal Camp. This was unique in that a large majority of the attendees were deeply involved in design - not just coding modules. While some of the usual suspects were there, many designers were meeting each other for the first time.

I'm happy to have seen the good response to my "What shall we do about themes?" post. I'm particularly glad to see a bunch of self-described designers participating, and to see the thoughtfulness of the comments.

From the 50+ comments, a few consistent messages emerged (no editorial pen here; just consolidating / summarizing):

Today in the Boston Globe there's an article in the business section about Acquia. It's gratifying to see our company start to get visibility outside the close-knit Drupal community. I just wanted to take a moment to expand on it a bit.

For almost as long as I've been involved with Drupal, there's been a running complaint – either a (false) perception or (true) reality – that Drupal is "theme-challenged" compared to alternatives like Joomla and WordPress. I had this complaint myself when I first started using Drupal. Our investors heard it during their due-diligence on Drupal. And I continue to hear it from people I meet who are building their first Drupal site.

Acquia isn't my first company; I've constructed a few before. In fact, bringing well-suited people together to achieve something together is one of those things that (I think) I just naturally do. I've done it over and over in life. Maybe it comes from my dad being a guy who was always pushing the envelope when it came to things like health foods for long life, etc., and then trying to convince others to do likewise.

Looks like Marten Mickos, one-time CEO of MySQL is leaving Sun. Matt Asay talked to Mickos, and had a sense that they key motivating factor was "(Mickos') frustration at Sun's bureaucracy."

Ahhhh.... In the cycling world, when you catch up to a group riding ahead of you, and pass them with ease, you feel sooooo happy about the the fact that you're strong enough to pass them. (Am I competitive? Nah... ;-)

The same thing happens in tech, too. The latest example? When closed source vendors start to get defensive about open source alternatives, you know the open source is starting to affect their business, and the open source project is pulling up to - and passing - the closed-source products.

I just took 30+ minutes to watch Kathy Sierra speaking at a WordCamp SF event. It's worth listening to.

The search technology area is highly important to people with websites. As a result, I've spent serious time looking at it. Several things have come from this time spent:

• The important thing: We'll soon be adding "hosted site search" capabilities to the Acquia Network for our subscribers. More about this below.

Lots of video conversations. Jay gets goofy occasionally. Jeff runs a timer to keep us (me) from going down too many rabbit holes. Dries wears headphones to keep from driving Karlijn nuts.

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