Link to October 4 New York Times article, "Obsessions with Minutiae Thrive as Databases".
Excerpt: Managing a database doesn’t exactly sound like a path to fame and fortune — more like a path to a role in a company’s technology department. But the market has been kind to the visionaries who began to collect information online in the 1990s.
Before Internet experts spoke of crowd sourcing, or of the crowd’s wisdom, these database creators thought to harness an enthusiastic worldwide public to pursue seemingly impossible quests, like developing a catalog of all movies or of all recorded music. And over time, as those quests seemed more achievable, big entertainment companies came calling, recognizing the value of having access to the minutiae of their business.
That, in a nutshell, is the story behind two early online standouts, IMDB, the Internet Movie Database, and CDDB, a database of CDs now known as Gracenote, each with big corporate parents.
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