Hey Bert, in case someone hasn't already sent this NYTimes article to you:

Like other young people on the fast track, Mr. Hammond has run the numbers and figures that an M.B.A. is a waste of money and time — time that could be spent making money. “There’s no way that I would consider it,” he says.

;)

Watch me choke with irony when I go for my MBA in two years...

. . .

Marc Andreessen (of Netscape and Ning fame) has written an excellent post about Internet platforms. If there is one place to learn everything you need to know (from a somewhat non-techie point of view), this post is it.

An Access API should become standard. Actually, I think all applications should be written with an API first and a UI second. That part is a no-brainer.

The "Plug-in" API is an interesting idea. While I was initially very excited about Facebook's API, I've really cooled down on the idea after realizing that most people abused the plug-in to try to turn me into a werewolf (you know what I'm talking about). That aside, there's a *huge* overhead to learning these Plug-in APIs; each site you have to relearn the plug-in architecture.

I've been wondering for a while if I could leverage the traditional plug-in model that Movable Type, Drupal, and Wordpress are known for in a system like Tabulas by using programmatic hooks.

This is going to sound very similar to what Facebook does, so please shush: you could register a URL as a hook that will be hit every time a specific action is undertaken. For example, I might specify: http://roykim.net/tabulas/journal/post as the place that Tabulas should POST to before saving my entry - Tabulas would take the entries contents and POST the whole thing to that URL - the URL would do some processing on it and pass it back to Tabulas; Tabulas would then save whatever your site returned.

You could use this hook to save your entry locally, or do some transformation on it (autolink your own entries, do your own smilies, etc) before passing it back to Tabulas.

These hooks could be all over the place - when you save an image, when you write an entry, when you save a link, etc.

The hooks would be accompanied by a PHP script I'd write, which would handle all the communication issues, so all you'd have to do is literally write some PHP code (and work with native PHP data structures). You'd never have to know about how the communication works; you just write your own PHP code and let the script you installed happily handle everything else.