Wired Magazine featured a story, a while back about Ryan Sit a 29-year-old software developer from San Diego, who developed listpic.com a site that used web bots or web scraping techniques to automatically pull images from craigslist for-sale listings and reorganize them into an easier-to-navigate, more attractive format. The site become an instant hit attracting 43,000 vistors a month and earned serveral thousand dollars in advertising revenues each month according to Wired. The article looks are how many “web 2.0″ companies require and scrape web information, relying on the information as business critical process and  play devils advocate by asking the question what happens, if the few who control the information stop it.

But beneath all the kumbayas, there’s an awkward dance going on, an unregulated give-and-take of information for which the rules are still being worked out. And in many cases, some of the big guys that have been the source of that data are finding they can’t — or simply don’t want to — allow everyone to access their information, Web2.0 dogma be damned. The result: a generation of businesses that depend upon the continued good graces of a relatively small group of Internet powerhouses that philosophically agree information should be free — until suddenly it isn’t. - Wired Magazine

The article talks in depth about how web 2.0 business, require and depend on this information to startup their company and use Ryan Sit as an example of when this “web 2.0 share your information freely uptopia” suddenly comes crashing down. full article