I’m really freaked out. I have one of the biggest interviews of my life coming up and I’m way under qualified to host it.

It’s on Thursday and it’s about Scalability and Performance of Web Services.

Look at who will be on. Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic, the company behind WordPress (and behind this blog). Paul Bucheit, one of the founders of FriendFeed and the creator of Gmail (he’s also the guy who gave Google the “don’t be evil” admonishion). Nat Brown, CTO of iLike, which got six million users on Facebook in about 10 days.

All three have faced huge scalability problems head on. All three are developers and architects who actually have built systems that have built great reputations online.

I’m totally out of my league and as I do more and more research on the topic I realize just how out of my league I am.

But, one good thing about doing stuff online is that:

1. I can admit I’m over my head and get help from you.
2. I just need to know enough to be dangerous to get a conversation going between these three guys.
3. I’m not the only interviewer here. You will take over and fill in the pothole in my own knowledge (we’ll get you involved via Skype).

It’s free. It’s open to you.

So, since I’m clueless about the topic, what would you ask these guys about how to build scalable and performant Web services, especially given that tomorrow’s services are probably going to be glued together from a variety of services?

Oh, and thanks to Rackspace for sponsoring this webinar (we’re filming it at the excellent Revision 3 studios in San Francisco).

I just visited the offices of Lefora, free forum hosting, who is making cool new forum software that goes in interesting new directions that I haven’t seen forum software or services do yet. Stuff like embeddable YouTube videos with just copying the URL. And I +love+ the color theme selector they have.

You’ll see that in the video demo I just filmed with Vinnie Lauria, VP of product.

Paul Bragiel, CEO, told me a lot more about the company and its plans in a separate video.

An example of their new forums can be found on their “fun stuff forum.”

UPDATE: In just a few minutes Vinnie created me a forum.