New entrants to the PPC market are unnecessarily bidding up prices.
The influx of monied newbies means that people who actually *depend* on PPC for a living need to start managing their PPC investment as a portfolio, not at a granular per-keyword level.
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I can't tell you the number of companies and SEM consulting firms who think they know how to bid keywords when in reality they know about as much as my 6-year-old boy. If you think that knowing the value of an individual keyword and bidding accordingly is a strategy, consider this:
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In the traditional advertising world, there are scores of people inside F1000s and on Wall Street whose sole job is to manage eight, nine and ten-figure marketing budgets. They use sophisticated portfolio management and modeling tools that allow them to take portfolio goals and apply them to individual media buys; the net effect of this is that they can fit costly point spends into a broader portfolio and still make more money and a larger media spend than the smaller companies. The same thing will happen to the PPC space - large media buyers will come in and bid up the most valuable keywords by virtue of media portfolio management analysts and technologies.
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So what's the little guy to do? IMO the smaller PPC buyers (<$100K/month) need to have the best web analytics deployments, track to the individual keyword level, and implement media portfolio management solutions - not per-keyword bid mgmt tools like GoToast, Did-It and BidRank - but real portfolio mgmt tools.