[UPDATE: 9/24, 4.30p PT - The curtain has lifted on "X" - and the answer is, Oracle's now in the hardware business, along with HP and Intel. See the Twitter-feed here, and Lauren's drafting her news story on it as we speak.]

Another new kind of blogpost for us, with a h/t to @ccarfi for inspiring its format: a Twitter-feed repost, but with the occasional annotation that 140-character tweets made tough to include.

#oow08 #X I’m eager to find out if this “X” announcement (4.15pPT, following #Ellison closing keynote) can possibly match the hype.

#oow08 #X One thing’s for sure: The cordoned-off area in Moscone North’s lobby can’t possibly handle the crowds that will try to be there.

Moscone North Lobby, via KWalsh@Flickr

#oow08 #X The “Extreme Performance” banner at the east side of closed-down Howard St. might be a major clue;that’s a major ad spot for ORCL.
[Its counterpart, at the western end of the Moscone Center’s Howard St—a street, btw, that Oracle takes control of each OpenWorld, much to the anger and dismay of local San Franciscans—is a massive series of LED (?) screens arranged in a manner reminiscent of NYC’s Bento-box-like New Museum. I’ll try to find images of each. UPDATE 9/25, 5.30p PT: Here they are:

The New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC (photo courtesy of www.bdonline.co.uk)

Oracle OpenWorld 2008 sign, at Howard St. & 4th St., SF (Photo by Lauren McKay)

#oow08 #X re: “Extreme Performance”: RT @mgareth RT @chiheacho Andy Mendelsohn drops a tiny hint on mystery news “X” http://snurl.com/Xhint

#oow08 #X In clip,Mendelsohn says, “We’re calling it ‘X’ for ‘extreme performance.’ ” Can it play into cloud computing+collaboration themes?
[Those have been the two recurring memes here at OOW’08; the other words that Oracle has pushed—complete, open, secure, integrated—all play in, I suppose, but those two have gotten the heat.]

#oow08 #X RT @mgareth Anticipation builds around the X announcement. read about it @alexgorbachev’s blog: http://snurl.com/Xpythian
[I have to admit the folks there are clearly more well-versed than I am when it comes to database matters. (Anyone who knows me can tell you that's a very low threshold to surpass.) Someday I'll submit to a remedial course in the underpinnings of the data world—unless this X announcement is a sign that I may not ever have to? (What's that saying about "if wishes had wings..."?) At any rate, the point here is that these guys, who really know databases, and who have made clear that they expect Ellison will veer from his typical "One FusionApp to rule them all" style of closing keynote, have amassed a lot of anecdotal evidence to support the notion that it's a data-use performance announcement.]

#oow08 #X And Ellison told analysts in June of “a major database innovation that we will announce in September.”

#oow08 #X Thx 2 @alexgorbachev, we have a pulled-but-cached blogpost by Oracle’s Kevin Closson: http://snurl.com/xclosson

#oow08 #X & given the musings of Forrester’s Jim Kobielus http://snurl.com/Xjk I’m ready2believe the news is “storage and data in the cloud”

#oow08 #X #Ellison is coming on after HP’s Mark Hurd, so it’s valid to expect some kind of connection there.

#oow08 #X P.S. I also think Hurd experience at Teradata lets him add more background to intro Ellison’s announcement.

So I guess we’ll have to wait and see; check back after 3.30pPT to see what’s happened, or follow my Twitter feed during The Larry Show to get up-to-the-minute snippets as they happen.