Yes yes, I’m an ogre for not feeling compassion for fellow human beings. I should think before I speak, I’m not being PC enough, whatever. What I think makes the earthquake situation in Haiti – correction – the international aid that’s flowing into the earthquake stricken Haiti that’s being championed as some sort of “chance to pull together” for all, regardless of political or other agendas. Since I’m Canadian, I’m most concerned with the promise that the federal government made to match all donations by Canadians. The fact that our current Governor General is of Haitian descent doesn’t really help placate my concerns.

However, over and above all of these other legitimate self-serving concerns, I’m quite distraught about the fact that all of this aid is not actually going to have much positive impact on the lives of these people in the long run, even if it is morally justifiable. The people of Haiti were (for the most part) living in poverty before the disaster, in a country devoid of transparent systems and decent infrastructure. After all of the aid arrives and the earthquake victims consume all of their bottled water and Canadian bacon, or whatever it is that we’re sending, how will their lives change? What’s to stop the donations from being diverted by corrupt officials for uses other than originally intended? I for one don’t support the donations; if those people weren’t worthy of donations before the earthquake, I don’t think they’re any more worthy after; the corruption index for Haiti is rather too high to be able to entrust the Haitian government with large quantities of supplies and money. It’s entirely possible, and even likely, that donations will perpetuate the state of poverty and misery that the majority of people in Haiti are already in, rather than alleviating the problems.

Happy 2010,

I am semi-”giving in” on the whole Internet advertisement thing – but not totally. If you’ve been reading my posts with any degree of regularity, you’ll know that I really, really, REALLY don’t like internet advertising, and I go through reasonable lengths to ensure that the ads I see are minimal. However, hosting services do cost money, so putting some ads on verStory seems to be the best option. I just whipped up a quick revenue sharing plugin (however the “sharing” part is still in the works, thus you’ll currently only see Google ads on my blog and not on all hosted verStory blogs). At any rate – I want the authors of the other verStory blogs to also be able to make revenue, so – once complete – the Google ads on verStory will be half verStory ads and half the ads of authors of given blogs. I also want to build in some really good positional configuration, so that users can customize the degree of ad visibility, but we’ll see how things go.

Finally, the only way that I can justify this insertion of ads, is to bring attention (again) to an excellent Firefox plugin that will completely block ads (at least the ones that will be on verStory):

Adblock Plus

Another interesting phenomenon is the monetization that seems to have occurred with WordpressMU in general. As far as I can tell, the site is pretty much useless unless you register for a “premium” account, and most authors of WordpressMU plugins have stopped hosting them and (I assume) joined the WordpressMU “premium” dev team. Whether or not I’ll look into that or simply release my plugin for free once it’s complete, I’m really still not sure.

Anyhow – again – happy New Year, and Season’s Greetings, and whatnot