Serendipity vs Movable Type

So for those that didn't hear, I attended the eBay Developer's Conference in vegas this past weekend (6/9 - 6/11). It was very interesting. It has opened my eyes to some stuff and reaffirmed stuff I already had ideas about.

Before I go on about various ideas. Let me explain the title. I attended several sessions that talked about how Web 2.0 tools and Blogs can help you build your business. The Blog technology was evangelised by Six Apart's Anil Dash. His sessions were very good, made a beliver out of me. However, MovableType Six Apart's downloadable (vs hosted) product is based in Perl. I don't know a fscking thing about Perl. Serendipity however is based in PHP, I know a decent amount about PHP.

Reaffirmed Ideas:

#1: eBay has too much money.
Fact: eBay acquired Skype for $2.6B in cash and stock (Skype is primarily a free service)
Fact: eBay had an open bar serving Grey Goose vodka and Patrón tequila

#2: Drinking too much Patrón is bad
Fact: Took two days to get over the hangover.
Fact: Chasing two tumblers of Patrón with a couple of Coronas, then a couple of Guiness pints only makes it worse

#3: PayPal will be the new Visa
Fact: PayPal already is the default payment method on eBay.
Fact: PayPal bought Verisign's PayFlow Pro (say that three times fast) unit and now boasts customers like Dell and PrivateTel (shameless plug)

#4: Web 2.0 has an infinite number of definitions
Fact: Some call it AJAX powered applications
Fact: Others call it what comes after bubble 1.0
Fact: Others call it the community based tools and services like Blogs, Wikis, Digg, Flickr, etc.

New Ideas:
1. Community based web applications/sites are more popular and powerful than I realized.
2. You can refer to an individual method/function in an API as an API, thus producing hundreds of APIs instead of one API with hundreds of methods.
3. Never bet $20 on black. (Bet $10 on black, and $10 on red)
4. Drinking the "kool-aid" isn't a terribly bad thing to do at a conference.