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Kibu hoo
I forget what the revenue model was, but I'm sure it had to do with "targetted" something. I'm still waiting for the demand-aware (much less -driven) marketing that pulls anything new in quantities sufficiently massive to justify typically massive build-a-Xanadu-and-they-will-come site-creation expenses. If you want to raid the Kibu talent pool, check out a post-mortal innovation by the Kibu People: their own aggregated resumes, at KibuPeople.com. Source: Reuters It isn't what we're building. It's how. The other day Dave wrote about syndication models, one based distributing content and the other on distributing links. The latter, he said, follows "the grain of the Web." I love that metaphor: the grain of the Web. It' speaks from a wise carpenter's understanding of construction materials. I've believed for some time that the software industry is maturing into another construction industry, slowly and subtly morphing from one dominated by a few manufacturers into one defined by its many practitioners: the architects, designers, builders and developers who do the work. Construction is a mature industry. And it's huge, perhaps $trillions in size. Significantly, there is no Microsoft in the construction industry, although there are companies with larger revenues. More significantly, we hire architects and builders for their good work, not for their fealty to producers of building materials. They're professionals. We trust them to make good choices. Those professionals are taking over the industry. Subtly. Pervasively. Show me a company that announces a "strategic" decision to use Linux as a building material, and I'll show you a company in full compliance with the architects and builders it employs. This was clearly the case with IBM. In my conversations with IBM over the past two years, it has been clear that the decision to develop on Linux was made first by countless engineers, not by managers higher up the nominal decision tree. This also puts both Linux and open source in a kind of perspective. One's a building material. The other is a building method. It's not a lot more complicated than that. Both offer practical alternatives. Not political, religious or moral causes. In the long run, the arguments will boil down to professional ones about practical choices. Do you get more done, and is the work done better, when you're building with X and the source is open or closed? Licenses can be understood on similar terms, but with the added dimension of conversation. The software trade, like the construction trade, involves countless conversations about what's good, what isn't and why. I believe software licenses inherently restrict that conversation; although maybe they serve as ways to harden building materials or to formalize building methods. I'm not sure. That's another conversation. Meanwhile, two architectures — weblogs and discussion groups — are being advanced enormously by the industry of their most creative architects. Yesterday Dave pointed to a Jakob Nielsen Alertbox on content creation that provoked a response by Pyra's Evan Williams in which Jakob calls this weblog (mine, here) his favorite (thanks, Jakob!). Meanwhile, Rusty Foster has resurrected Kuro5hin, which has the most thoughtfully-designed moderation system I've seen yet (an expression of Rusty's Scoop, in which Kuro5hin is written). Today Slashdot brought up the moderation subject, pointing to a Kuro5hin piece posted by nebby, who has a site called half-empty, which is powered by his own system called glasscode. And on it goes. The sound of an industry, building itself.
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Just heard that 
In addition to his own thoughts, Dave also points to an interesting 
