[enki]

(author here)

I was writing this more in the sense that kids at BioCurious (and the DIY Bio Movement in general) are doing electrophoresis to transfer DNA from glowing jellyfish to bacteria. This is just a few (two?) years after someone got a Nobel prize for that.

That's progress. If stuff that used to be hard falls into kids hands, you're gonna see impressive stuff happening.

However I fully agree that it takes more than that to build a company (Also I wouldn't try to compete with 2012 Google using 1998 technology)

[streptomycin]

Just pointing out... Nobel prizes aren't given for cutting edge work, they're given many years later. People have been doing transfection of genes for decades.

The Nobel prize you're referring to was probably the one for GFP. Interestingly, a huge challenge in using GFP now is patent issues and thus money issues, rather than technical issues.

[InclinedPlane]

Fair enough. The title seems a bit link-baity, I think something along the lines of "the infrastructure of 1998's Google" would have been better.

[billpatrianakos]

I half disagree. If you're blogging then the point is to get that blog some eyeballs on it. Otherwise you write in a journal or don't make it publicly accessible or at the very least don't help it get indexed and never link to it.

I think there's link-bait and then there's LINK BAIT! (TM). It's a fine line between the two. You have to have a catchy, preferably keyword splattered, title or you become yet another blog no one cares about. I also think there's too much focus on the title when it comes to real link-bait. The really awful kind of link-bait is the kind that links to an article with very little to no content having anything to do with the title. In this case I think the article corresponded with the title enough for it not to be link-bait-style misleading. But that's me and there is no real answer. Just interpretations.

[InclinedPlane]

I wholeheartedly disagree. If you are blogging ideally you are doing so because you are injecting valuable insights or information into the world at large. The value is not to you that eyeballs are on your blog but to the eyeballs themselves.