There were three blog entries that caught my attention today. Both indicate to me that the industry as a whole has not only woken up to the massive potential of passion-centric communities (you may call them vertical communities or niche communities), but how it is embracing them with open arms.

The first is a very insightful post by Yahoo! EVP Jeff Weiner, Mission as Strategy, outlining the results of Yahoo’s recent re-org and their overarching strategy to “leverage our assets to build the most relevant, comprehensive, dynamic, and open repository of knowledge and content on the Web.” He boils it down to a single mission statement “To connect people to their passions, communities, and the world’s knowledge.”

At Dogster and Catster, connecting people with common passions online has always been the heart of what we do from day one. It’s been rewarding and brought us great success. Yahoo has hundreds of properties and hundreds of millions of users: focusing on connecting those people with their passions and interests deeper then anyone else can offer is, in my humble opinion, the most powerful strategic decision they could make. While Google and Microsoft battle it out for the heart of the corporate software market and while incredibly powerful search inexorably becomes a commodity, Yahoo can be a giant passion center neither can touch. (AOL, IAC and to a lesser degree FIM or a well-executed roll-up of independent properties may present Yahoo! with the best competition on this front.)

The second blog entry is a much more innocuous TechCrunch piece on Angling Masters, a passion-centric community for fishers. The fact there is a profile-oriented fishing site does not surprise me. (I have stated many times before that for every popular forum site in the late 90s there will be popular profile-sites.) What surprised me was that more then 50% of the comments thought positively about the site’s potential and not one responder felt compelled to trash it. Just 6 months ago, a review of such a company would have drawn out dozens of fierce rants about the stupidity of bubble2.0, reckless VCs and copy-cat entrepreneurs. I’m not saying such rants don’t have a time and place for certain events, but the pundit chatter that passion-centric communities are fools gold that will flop faster then pets.com has almost come to a complete stop.

A final note that I’ll have to share here is a report today that ClubPenguin, a superb site for kids, has only 500,000 members but will make $67M this year AND they are very contentious about keeping site play and advertisements apart.

Hat-tip to Scott Rafer for pointing out a couple of these entries to me.