Why eBay, Monster and others business models will come under further attack

PubSub founder Bob Wyman makes a compelling argument about how eBay, Monster, MeetUp and many others have a business model that will come under attack once the "Gray Web" is diminished in scope. He defines the Gray Web as something between the "visible web" that is well-covered by mainstream search engines and the "hidden web". That is, there are pages that are visible but aren't usefully indexed by search engines today. Long-term, virtually any web directory will threatened by the removal of the so-called Gray Web. That's not to say that there won't be other ways to grow their business but the "old" way will eventually wane. Years ago, Bob and I had some overlap in dealing with "solution provider" partners at Microsoft -- he was one of the few product group people who had a grounding in both his product and the business realities our enterprise customers/partners faced. It looks like he's still on his game.