Often building a better mouse trap is the best kind of innovation.  In these days of Foolish Facebook Evaluations and VC money tripping over each other to find the next hot internet platform it makes sense to remember that Altavista was an early winner in the Search Engine space and Friendster is widely attributed as the creator of Social Networking -- where are these brands now?

As Brian and I are starting to promote CrowdFusion the question comes up a lot, "What is unique about your Internet Web Publishing Platform?".   Everyone wants you to condense your product down to an elevator pitch.  I can't --  we are building a better mouse trap -- we have revolutionary concepts -- but they need to be seen within the context of the overall product. 

Why does the internet community have such a short attention span?  Is it just a product of it entering its teen years or being dominated by twenty somethings?  The New York Tech Meetup, The Demo Conference, and Techcrunch 40 are examples of the distilling of brilliantly comlex internet applications into 'one hit wonders'.   Are they reacting to the true demands of the internet consumer or are they prolonging the notion that the internet is one long stream of memes and celebrity gossip?