Matt's discussion poses the question from two positions, the first being the webmaster and the second being the business owner. Both positions have totally different perspectives on link building.

As a webmaster you are most likely wearing many different job hats - designer, developer, content writer, paid search manager, SEOer. Link builder definitely falls under this umbrella. The webmaster should be the one in charge of the link building or managing the link builder (depending on the size of the site). A webmaster should know about link building, everything from why it is valuable to how to get links, this is just part of the job. The webmaster is the person who should be hitting the pavement to get the links because they understand the site and what the links will do for it.

Conversely, the business owner, shouldn't be proactively link building. Business owners should be educated on the value of links and how they can uniquely contribute to the link building process through networking, engagement, relationships and the daily due course of their business operations. This goes the same for any of the employees of the business. They should be trained to recognize a link opportunity so they can respond to situations with "do you mind adding a link to that for me?" or thinking to themselves "I should definitely add my companies link to my profile on such-and-such site".

@Matt

I have to agree with you on the reactionary standpoint. Google appears to be just barely maintaining the quality of their SERPs to keep the user base from leaving and their AdWords rev. from diving.

I think they have greatly slipped as a thought leader in the search industry. Just take a look at some of the latest moves:

Instant - Rehashed Yahoo tech

Instant Preview - Taken from Bing

Image SERPs update - Taken from Bing

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I think they are are busier with trying to figure out how they can continue to grow based on what they have and not concerned with improving what they have to spur growth.

I seem to remember a time when Google use to display a red 'X' button next to search results when you were logged in. This customization allowed you to personalize frequented searches so that only the ones you wanted at the top would be displayed at the top.

I no longer see that button but they still have the Star feature that allows you to like/favorite a result.

On an individual scale I never found it exceedingly useful (probably b/c I am an SEO). But I imagine as a crowd-sourced location for signals about individual results (if used) it may be helpful to Google to find the craftiest of content spam offenders.

Thanks Ruud.

Please reconsider the usage  of the Facebook like button. It is killing me with how long it now takes pages to load especially on the primary tabs when it has to load 10 of them at a time.

Part one of the interview can be found here: http://sphinn.com/story/147288.

Anyone else notice that the former company - http://www.clickresponse.net - won't even sport the badge?

Figured they would at the very least help support their founder in new endevours ... or not

Hoping to step-up my game in 2010 to become a White Coat SEO Scientist (lets see how that works out)!

Would like to offer up another perspective on Universal Personal Search/Web History. I think that it will only solidify the need for SEO and can only help to strengthen the importance of SEO in maintaining and obtaining top positions on results pages. Thoughts here: http://sphinn.com/story/136145