The Viamentis Blog

Like any self-respecting geek, I have a lot of respect for Joel. He’s entertaining to read, though sometimes off his rocker, he makes sense and valid points. I was pleasantly surprised to read his latest article Bribing Bloggers, which I think is a very cool thing to do. He earned a few brownie points in increased credibility, which I think is his motive. So what about services like PayPerPost? I think you cannot stop commerce - if there is a way to make money, people will use it, sooner or later. PayPerPost makes this kind of bribing almost systematic.

Which I think, will lead to the rise of bloggers writing big-time disclosures like “I didn’t get any freebie from XYZ Co.” to hang on to their credibility. Or maybe, a separate network like 9rules which basically says “we’re clean bloggers”. Hmm. I think there is a VC-funded startup somewhere in there.

Here’s wishing you all Hearty Season’s Greetings and Happy Holidays. Enjoy!

No company should be in an unenviable position that Yahoo is these days. The company is under relentless pressure from Google which seems like it can do no wrong, while Yahoo’s executive team is being re-shuffled, under ever-increasing pressure from Wall St. to do some kind of acquisition, most probably Facebook, it’s developers write sad blog posts and even it’s christmas parties suck. Boy. Bad times.

Only a few months back, maybe an year, I thought Yahoo is giving Google a good fight. It has done some excellent acquisitions like Flickr, del.icio.us, etc. Sadly, I see no focus, because Yahoo Photos still exists, and was re-vamped recently.  The new Yahoo Mail Beta is hardly usable. Sigh. There’s got to be a good competitor to Google, at least to keep it from slacking off on innovation. Here’s hoping 2007 will be a much better year for Yahoo.

Apart from that, Happy Holidays, everyone!

I’ve been digging into an fairly popular open source PHP-based CMS/blog platform for some modifications and integration into existing systems. Suffice to say that some of the code in there really scares the hell out of me. I thought writing Tcl code for OpenACS invariably leads to spaghetti code. You should see PHP in all its tangled glory. I wonder how people maintain systems which are such a pita. Coming from the neatly-ironed world of Rails and it’s MVC sweetness, PHP indeed feels like a throwback to dark ages. Shudder. I hope I don’t have to work too much with this icky stuff.