CNET's the social: Earnings are healthy and new digital-ad networks are debuting by the day, but no one can deny that these economic times demand caution.

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Sure, Yahoo's new service is already driving almost as much traffic to outside Web articles as Digg does. But how does that help Yahoo?

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"Given that tendency [IT business experience], you'd think that when I had the opportunity to create it all from scratch, I would remember the fundamentals. But at our first audit, I was informed that we needed to increase our focus on the fundamentals. Why had I neglected the very things I'd been preaching about for years? In hindsight, it's pretty easy to see the things I needed to be doing better:"

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"Steve Rubel over at Micro Persuasion has a nice writeup on the Trust Issue regarding startups and I just cannot agree more. History has shown that any startup which wants to gain a big userbase and wants to keep it needs to invest in trust. There are many examples already where it failed."

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The number of ad clicks fell in January for Google and Yahoo. But how important are those click-through rates, anyway?

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As the Forrester Research analyst catalogues in a running tally, scores of vendors are now in the "white-label" social networking platform business.

Instead of a proprietary platform like LinkedIn or Facebook, such companies offer a framework to enterprises or individuals wishing to build an online community tailored to their tastes and needs. The platforms are being used for everything from marketing and branding to internal enterprise use.

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"It's no secret the Internet has changed the way consumers get information about products and the companies that provide them. Because so much intelligence about a potential transaction is so readily available from independent sources, the message provided by conventional advertising has declined in value to consumers, who even question its trustworthiness."

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"More and more retailers are building social networking sites and tools to help sell their wares."

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I just completed one of the most exhausting days at work I've had since switching over from operations to IT. Everyone wanted a "minute of my time" which translates in the real world to 20 minutes (if I was lucky). The last thing I really wanted to do after work was touch a computer. Yet, I find myself too excited to not type about some great news.

What is the good news? Dries Buytaert, project leader for Drupal, is starting his first Drupal startup. The working name for the company is Acquia.

Thus, I'm starting a Drupal company whose current working name is 'Acquia'. Acquia's software products will include a number of Drupal distributions -- for community networks, digital media properties, corporate websites, and others. In addition to providing Drupal distributions, Acquia will build the Drupal-tuned analogue of the RedHat Network, over which we can deliver a wide variety of electronic services intended to be useful to people developing and operating Drupal websites. An example such service is an automated upgrade/update service, an uptime and performance monitoring / reporting service, a configuration management service, etc.

Does anyone else see the irony in Drupal's founder not beginning his first Drupal startup until seven years after releasing Drupal publicly? Think of all the developers, IT leaders, and companies that have prospered over the years from Drupal. In all that time, Dries has been very careful to not benefit more than others in the Drupal community. All in all, I think Dries has shown the highest respect for open source as well as loyalty to the Drupal community.

Already, some of the other CMS news related sites are wondering how the Drupal community will react to Dries' announcement. Comparisons are already being made to other open source CMS projects that have been torn between commercial and community interests. Take this CMS Watch post for instance: