Much love (and a free fake iPhone) to dear reader Richard who sent us this link to the article which explains why the Skype deal made so much sense. Money quote: “Keep in mind that one of the biggest changes now happening in business is the empowerment of the individual. It’s all about power being dispersed by the intrinsic equalizing force of the Net. You might say that eBay seems intent on creating the first genuine conglomerate of what I have called the Contribution Economy.”

Riiiiiight. The contribution economy. That’s a powerful meme for leveraging tropes and achieving synergies across disparate disintermediated communities that are pixelating and being reinvented as the distributive disruptive power of the always-on 24-7 Net creates a new self-organizing organism that is in effect evolving into a protean electronic self in which connections are switched on and off with increasing rapidity, friction is removed from the system, the world is flattened, and change is the only constant. Ergo, Skype is worth a zillion billion dollars. Pretty simple stuff, really.