I'm going to be at BADcamp 2011 in Berkely this coming weekend. I have three agendas:

• Speaking. I'm giving a talk on Web Engagement Management. "What," you say?" If you're an average Drupalist, you may not have heard this term - yet. But you will a lot, soon. It's the term that closed-source CMS' are using to frame where they're headed - which is to empower marketing more. I will have a bunch more to say on this, but come to the session to hear the basics.
• Listening. In support of the Web Engagement stuff, there's a bunch of things I want to hear - from talks on mobile theming, mobile apps, responsive ux, and much more.
• Spinning Happily, the BADcamp organizers have asked me to reprise my music playing from last year's BADcamp. I'll be spinning some House, Deep House, a teeny bit of urban, and maybe some deep remixes of some Jazz classics at the Evening of Drupal party. I hope you'll come and listen, as spinning is my third passion (after Drupal & cycling, of course).

I hope to see you there.

Using Drupal has suddenly become much easier. My company, Acquia, has just released into (private) Beta Drupal Gardens. We've been working on Drupal Gardens for over a year, teaming our expert Drupalers with our crack infrastructure / hosting experts, to provide Drupal 7 as a hosted service. We've included tons of usability improvements, and contributed the vast majority of them back to the open source project.

Drupal Gardens is truly amazing. It'll rock your socks off if you're a Drupaler, and even if you're not, it'll make building extremely powerful websites drop-dead simple.

Watch the screencast below, and come sign up for a Private Beta invitation.

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.

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