mattg3 - 9:16 am on Sep 26, 2006 (gmt 0)

Just great .. so now on top of maintaining our own systems and data .. now we have to upload tens of thousands of items into google base?!?!

Capitalism without working anti trust laws tends to develop towards free labour. You are given free tools and are expected to provide free content on the small hope to join the few that make enough money. Especially in English it's a global marketplace. It's the equivalent of small local shops being eaten up by the big supermarket chains. And given that the big option is only a mouse click away and not a car drive, the convenience shopping [aka you go to local shop, because you can't be a..ed to drive to the big one] falls away too. So the best option on the long run is to live in market segments that are too small for the big players to enter, but sufficient for you to survive. Aka very specialised products like selling honey made from some weird flower or so or to support/promote an offline business like a nursery home, pizza service or anything that can't be done virtually. BTW also the reason Google wants wee hobby sites in adsense, as this is the market they can't feed yet with profit but is in total big enough to skim of the small profits these pages can do for themselves.

The commercial net being about 10 years old is still somewhere in the industrial revolution stage maybe even before that. With SEO essentially dead, even knowledge about the SERPS can't really save you anymore.