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What's a NetSeminar? Here's what I think will happen if you register for my upcoming NetSeminar (free). This Thursday, December 2, 2004, at 11:00AM Pacific / 2:00PM Eastern / 6:00PM UTC you'll go to some kind of URL, which, I believe, you will be told about as a part of the aforementioned registration process, being careful to use Internet Explorer and to turn off all your popup blocking geegaws and script prevention whatnots. Whereby you will be treated to:

• an introduction by host Alexa Weber Morales, the editor of Software Development magazine, followed by
• a scintillating 24 minute presentation by me about social software, squeezed down to fit in 20 minutes, which will involve talking really really fast and leaving many proofs as exercises to the reader, followed by,
• a 20 minute infomercial by the sponsor of the whole thing, a company called Electric Cloud which makes a distributed parallel make utility. Electric Cloud was founded by John Ousterhout, who happens to be the creator of the language tcl (motto: "And you thought lisp had weird quoting semantics"), and he'll be doing the demo, followed by hossanas for aforementioned distributed make utility by QuickBooks team lead Jon Burt, who has promised to get that secondary - monitor - popups - jump - to - the - first - monitor bug in QB fixed for me. Thanks Jon, I'm holding you to it, followed by
• questions and answers, and all interspersed liberally with
• those fun and silly Internet live polls ("Parallel Distributed Make is (a) important (b) cost-effective (c) the cat's whiskers (d) all of the above")

The whole thing will take exactly 60 minutes, no more, no less, and then the nice salespeople at Electric Cloud will quarrel over the registration data, a.k.a. "the Glengarry leads." But seriously, just to keep the editorial / advertising story straight, I am being paid by Software Development Magazine to appear whilst Electric Cloud is paying to sponsor the whole thing, rah rah go blogs, even though Electric Cloud actually has really quite an interesting distributed make technology and you would probably want to check it out even if they weren't paying people to say that. So it's just like a regular seminar only it's on the net. Get it? A NetSeminar!

Anyway, as I said, that's what I think will happen. More likely there will be funny pratfalls, feedback sounds, microphone batteries dying, and in the background of my presentation you will hear glass breaking followed by babies wailing. I don't know where we'll get the babies. It's not like there are normally babies in my office.

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You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, designing user interfaces, running successful software companies, and rubber duckies.

About the author.

I’m Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek Software, a New York company that proves that you can treat programmers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers get private offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a week. Customers only pay for software if they’re delighted. We make FogBugz, an enlightened project management system designed to help great teams develop brilliant software, and Fog Creek Copilot, which makes remote desktop access easy.