Nick O'Neill writes about startups, media, and social platforms, including Facebook apps, Y Combinator, and why entrepreneurs fail.
Commenters link his posts on Forbes copying a New York Times article, Yahoo Pipes' influence, and running multiple startups at once.
From their web page, they only make money if there is a hire:
http://developerauction.com/for_employers
"If you end up hiring a candidate within 6 months of viewing their profile, we will invoice you..."
Note the phrasing "142 startups... submitted over $30m in job offers." Sounds like if company A bids $200K for SuperNerd, and company B bids $250K for SuperNerd, they'd count that as $450K of submitted bids. SuperNerd may have declined both offers, so income might be zero. See the "Vanity Metrics" section of this article (but ignore its title):
http://nickoneill.com/silicon-valley-is-filled-with-liars/
In a world of short attention spans, I don't want to listen to a podcast, and I doubt the podcast would have skyrocketed up the HN page.
Increasingly, smaller articles about other articles get much more traffic than the original source. One such example is the well-researched NYT article about how companies learn your secrets, and then the Forbes article that cut the crap and got to the real shocker of the story and got more pageviews (possibly $$$) http://nickoneill.com/how-fortune-stole-a-new-york-times-article-and-got-all-the-traffic-2012-02/
I wrote a post on this last night (published this morning) http://nickoneill.com/the-most-common-way-entrepreneurs-kill-their-business-2012-01/ ... my main conclusion is that running multiple startups at the same time is a great way to kill your startups. Yes, there are always exceptions to the rule (e.g. Jack Dorsey) but until you have a company that has a massive team that can support your business on an ongoing basis, it's not likely to work.
Here's one (but by no means the only) example: http://nickoneill.com/how-fortune-stole-a-new-york-times-article-and-got-all-the-traffic-2012-02/
From what I've seen, articles on forbes.com are mostly low-quality - often blogspam or tabloid-style journalism. They seem to have a good reputation in society which isn't represented by their articles.
I would be a happier living in a filter bubble with "forbes.com" removed from my life.
Saw this post this evening: http://nickoneill.com/building-a-plane-on-the-runway/ - "pivoting" is a meaningful startup pattern when it means "variations on a theme", informed by data and quantitative customer discovery, rather than the the "am I building an iOS app to manage your pet rock collection, or Airbnb for dogs?" flailing which too often hides behind the label.
Are you referring to Unix Pipe, which inspired Yahoo Pipes, which inspired ifttt and Zapire? (http://nickoneill.com/the-forgotten-yahoo-project-that-inspired-two-recently-funded-startups/)