I've been interested in the Blackboard pattern for years (especially back when I was studying AI), however I still haven't been able to find a good implementation of it outside of academia, although it seems a very useful pattern for the current trends in software development, I can't think of any big framework built around the pattern.
Does anyone here know of success or failure stories related to this pattern?
Note: Other links
Edit: Now I'm wondering if the pattern might have use as a pattern for a mashup-able ecosystem or something like that
Edit: After investigating some more I found an interesting paper which proposes stuff like Wikipedia is a Blackboard however it depends on Humans as agents. That just led me to realize StackOverflow is pretty much a Blackboard system, with us as agents, sharing our expert knowledge about the undetermined problems set on the board... anyways its some food for thought.
Have a look at tuplespaces and its implementations. It never had a big impact, but still an interesting approach towards building distributed applications.