Stefan Sagmeister, a designer I admire for both work and ideals, on picking clients:

“I recently took a year off from my clients. I used the time to make up my mind about all the fields I did not want to get into (but had previously imagined I would). (…) It made me think a lot about clients. I decided I would rather have an educated client than one I have to educate. Tibor’s line was that he would only take on clients smarter than him (but remember, a client does not have to be design literate to be smart).”

Where do you draw the line between taking a job and not taking a job based on your perception of the client? One of the things about the new possibilities on the web (the fact that so much is so easy), is that it generates a lot of people with “ideas for an amazing project” (half of those being myspace clones). Sadly companies can’t work with everyone on everything, so, where is your line? What if the sort of client that makes you jump fences, and what clients make you say no?

The funny thing about corporate blogs is that not every company does it right. CEOs hear the success stories, they read the books, but more often than not, the result ends up being another PR depot. Luckily some of the major players can still surprise us positively, and the latest has been Yahoo! with Yodel, their corporate blog.

If you’ve never been to Yahoo! – I was lucky to be in the US during a Flickr party -, be sure to check out their virtual tour video as it gives you a really good idea of the culture behind those guys. At least they’re doing things right, comparatively to other folks, whose public image gets weirder by the day.

Further reading:

Mike over at Techcrunch, our friends at Pronet Advertising and Paul Stamatiou (who’s to blame for the blog initiative) also report on the new Yahoo! Yodel Anecdotal. Have a read.

And speaking of corporate blogs: Steve, where’s your blog? We keep paying for the brand without getting a glimpse of its soul.

Its now only a month to Barcamp Portugal and things are shaping up! On September 2nd and 3rd, a group of campers (26 at the time writing) will be out discussing technology, innovation and the consumer-created web. If you haven’t signed up for Barcamp Portugal yet, this is the right time to do it: visit the barcamp wiki.

I will be (apart from organizing the event) giving a talk about innovation in a country that still doesn’t support ideas, and coordinating a few workshops – the program is still pretty much being built, as attendees prepare what they’ll be talking about. If you would like to present a project, idea, or just talk to the community, drop your name on the “Speeches and Workshops” section of the wiki.

Sponsorship opportunities

If you or your company want to support the event, please do so. We’re low on needs (after all, this is Barcamp) – but we’d like to accommodate BarCampers with drinks and food for the event. Barcampers (and ourselves, naturally) will be eternally grateful, and you’ll be associated with an event that got the best minds in the country together. So get in touch, and thanks!

If you need help with travelling

If you’re coming from abroad for the event, or need travelling for Barcamp, please contact the organization and we’ll be glad to give you a hand in finding the best deals and routes. In-depth instructions will also be posted on the wiki for those of you who driving. Remember to carpool, and see you soon!

Around here, we’ve been hosting projects on the web for the longest time. However for the last couple of years most of our development has been rails-centric, and hosting providers haven’t been helping at all.

Like us, there are many companies out there who are using rails to deploy applications for their clients or their own projects. Rails hosting is a growing necessity but the existing solutions are either mediocre or dumb. And when I say “dumb” I mean the provider doesn’t even know how rails scales or operates – all they know is they have it and that it “should work great out of the box” – and, you guessed it, it doesn’t.

Here’s what developers need

We need hosting companies that care about people developing web applications and the people that end up using them. We need the service to be reliable, because critical applications that don’t tolerate downtime. We need providers that understand the necessity of having an application up and running fast and with as little trouble as possible. We need providers who don’t hide behind support forms, and actually speak the same language as ourselves.

Companies like us, and many others, care deeply about the quality of service you people offer. Are there providers out there thinking and speaking “2.0″? If so, we definitely want to hear from you.