Your first referenced article is an interesting read, but doesn't match my experience. Between 1996 and 2001 I found 6 different contracts; of those, the first and last were found by personal referral (and served to get me respectively into and out of the contracting game), while each of the other 4 I found on a job board (JobSearch (UK)).

Maybe I was just lucky, or maybe the figures are misleading - I'm sure that there are many sectors in which vanishingly few positions are filled via Internet listings, and I'd guess therefore that in the IT sector a much higher percentage than the average are filled that way.

Hugo