In our article on the new rules of publishing 2.0 I mentioned that an enormous opportunity existed for a firm to create an RSS reconstruction tool -- a tool that essentially would facilitate the reconstruction of the web.

Yahoo seems to realize the value of reconstruction tools in an attention economy, and has thus released Yahoo! Pipes, a media reconstruction tool.

Conceptually, this idea is brilliant. We can say this because we know that in an attention economy, the best investments are those that help users maximize the ROI on their attention. Search is currently the leading example of this -- although the disruptor to search will be reconstruction (see our previous article, The Future of Search is Human).

So does Pipes put Yahoo! back in charge of leading the way to the 2.0 revolution?

It could. In order for Yahoo to come from behind and dethrone Google, it's going to really need to leverage its biggest edge asset: their userbase of Del.icio.us, Flickr, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo! Groups, and MyBlogLog kids that are all about social media. These properties need to be woven together into a single web app that individual members can use to create their own reconstruction-based communities. As we discussed in the mythology of web 2.0, the big winner of web 2.0 will be reconstruction-based communities for bloggers. Such communities are at the heart of branding 2.0, and will enable publishers in publishing 2.0 to enjoy a fair and just market where quality publishing gets rewarded accordingly -- while also enabling advertisers to escape the tyranny of waste that Google imposes via AdSense and AdWords. And judging by their recently launched Brand Universe initiative, Yahoo does seem to understand this on a conceptual level.

But alas, in the grand scheme of things, there is a problem: Yahoo is still Yahoo; it is a corporation, bound by structures and legalities of the corporate world and of corporate finances. In web 2.0, the hero's curse -- his poverty, his inability to compete financially with the forces of corporate finance -- is actually his gift: for when 1.0 corporate finance collapses, the organizations (or should I say, the networks) that ascend to top of the market won't just leverage peer-production; they'll be peer-production, and as such will be able to achieve greater edge competencies, cost savings, and innovation capabilities than any 1.0 corporation can even imagine.

It is, as always, inevitable.

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