“Welcome back.” “Where have you been?” “We thought you were dead.”

Well…would you first like the good news or bad?

The bad news really isn’t so bad. After all the great articles and blog posts that were written about us, we quickly realized that Kachingle was going to be a bigger idea from the start than what we dreamed of. Two pieces really put us on the map: First, there was Editor and Publisher’s Steve Outing article that called us a solution that just might “save journalism.” That was some pretty heady stuff. The next day, the Poynter Institute’s Bill Mitchell said even though we were “user-centric, voluntary, social and a little bit goofy” (we took that as a compliment, by the way), we had a shot at success anyway.

But then all of you started to comment on how yes, you liked our idea, and felt it had the potential to go big. Which lead to dozens more interviews, including those with NPR’s “On the Media,” the Chicago Reader’s piece “Will Report for Tips,” Business Week’s “The Online Experiments That Could Help Journalism,” and the Guardian’s “Cashing in on content.”

What next happened totally blew our minds: The largest media companies in the world started contacting us. Sites with tens of millions of unique users. It became clear to us that if just 1% started Kachingling, we were going to have problems scaling.

So we halted our testing and went back to the proverbial engineering drawing board.

The good news is that we’re making progress. We’re working on scaling, playing with new features. We’re still doing interviews here and there, talking behind the scenes with many of you, too. Because when we launch at the end of 2009, we want to be ready. You’re expecting nothing less.