"If the only tool you have is a hammer," said psychologist Abraham Maslow, "you tend to see every problem as a nail." I thought about that as I examined a couple of recently launched websites: The Industry Standard and NotchUp, both of which bear the "beta" label acknowledging their concepts are only partially baked.
The original Industry Standard was a business magazine aimed at the magical new economy that was being created by the Internet. It went dot-poof when the first dot-boom turned out to be a dot-bubble that dot-burst.
The new Industry Standard is a website, but it's not an online magazine. While it has some news and opinion that a writer would recognize, it's really a "prediction market" that attempts to capture and wisdom from the community. You "bet" on positions, such as "Yahoo to accept Microsoft acquisition." If you're right, you win virtual money that gives you a more powerful voice in future "betting." In theory, the result is a powerful indicator, like the stock market.
NotchUp is an employment marketplace built not around scarcity of jobs, but scarcity of good candidates from specific jobs. The big twist on the usual "post your resume and get a job" offer is that NotchUp promises to charge the potential employer for the contact information and pay you for the interview.
You also get some sort of percentage on anyone you recruit to join the system, a viral marketing trick that explains why I got a blizzard of invites over two or three days.
Both of these sites, interestingly, are built on the open-source Drupal CMS platform. This gets us back to the point about Maslow's hammer. Given the same toolkit, how would a newspaper company respond? For that matter, how many cutting-edge Web 2.0 pundits would have built the usual blog-centric presentation, with maybe a little bit of sweet Ajax goodness thrown in?
We are all subject to the Maslow's hammer effect.