I'd say that the link "builder" is dead. "Earning" links however, could be a different story. If content gets a lot of tweets, fb shares etc and non-manipulative links (not just 100 links with the same anchor text), then Google should still reward the site that earns those links. That was the direction that I was trying to go after the 24th. That said, it was more difficult to do that for a directory site, which is what TeachStreet was.