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.

Google Mail (or Gmail) is a great service. Enough storage to keep a hefty amount of email, and what you might call a cleverly developed fast user interface. But it has its shortcomings - shortcomings that annoy the hell out of me as a user, and that no one seems to care enough about to implement.

Email re-findability:

Storage is granted, so people tend to archive email (or just keep it for a very long time) in services like Gmail. This constitutes a problem when it comes to re-findability. Here’s a practical example:

I subscribe to the Ruby on Rails mailing list, which is pretty high traffic. Due to time constraints, I don’t read all the list’s emails - I archive them for reference. However, when I do search for something and find an email I know I’m going to be interested in the future, I can only “Star” it. That’s a start, but there’s no way for me to organize it in a way that conveys contextual meaning to me (in the middle of 20.000 other email messages).

So I’d like to be able to tag that email with keywords that mean something to me (e.g: rails, caching, bug) so that I can traverse a tree of tags and find that particular email fast if I need it. The usual search model for finding content just doesn’t cut it in this sort of situation.

The need for better solutions

Email solutions (like Gmail) aren’t the only products with content findability issues, but developers haven’t really woken up to that problem - even though they will have to sooner or later. We’re being overrun by increasing levels of information each day (in our email, in our RSS feeds, in our news), and haven’t found ways to properly deal with that.

There’s a larger version of the illustration in this story on our Flickr page.