Author: mathewi

As I wrote in an earlier blog post about Andrew Keen — author of Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture — we had a Q & A with the notorious Web 2.0 skeptic at globeandmail.com today, but despite my best efforts we didn’t get nearly as much back-and-forth as I was hoping. The full version is here (and, as is often the case, there’s some good responses in the comments) and James Robertson has some thoughts on the Q & A here.

Rachel Sklar, the lovely and talented Huffington Post blogger (and a star panelist at mesh) asked Keen:

“Who gets to be the arbiter of what is Good For Culture and what is Bad For Culture – some snobby on-high culture dude logrolling his buddy’s crappy book of “art” photos or the public, who votes with their eyeballs and their mouse clicks and their time?”

To which Keen responded:

here has always and will always be an arbiter of taste. Web 2.0’s idealists suggest otherwise — but behind their “democracy” is either an algorithm (easily gamed) or a new elite of generally anonymous tastemakers who are shaping wisdom of the crowd sites like reddit and digg. I like professional arbiters — reviewers, editors, agents, talent scouts.”

And I think Eric Berlin of Online Media Cultist and Blogcritics.org made a good point when he said:

“You’ve described “The Cult of the Amateur” as “not designed to be particularly fair or balanced.” What standard would you hold to the blogs that exist in your “digital forest of mediocrity”?

Is it possible in your view that some small percentage of the many millions of blogs add to the overall culture by some broad definition?”

To which Keen responded:

“Good question. I think that the percentage of good blogs is lower because the system has no filters. At least mainstream media has professional filters which, if not ideal, certainly gets rid of some of the dross and finds some jewels.

Professional filters don’t always work and tend toward somewhat conservative, populist and predictable taste. But I prefer to have my culture served up to me by professional tastemakers than an algorithm or by anonymous people on the Internet acting in the name of the virtuous crowd.”

In the end, that is the question — would you rather restrict yourself to the populist and predictable that gets served up by professional tastemakers, or do you enjoy a little more variety and spice, and are prepared to wade through a little dross to get to it? We have Keen’s answer.

And just between you and me, I have a feeling Mr. Keen is probably a lot less bombastic in his views than he makes out — extreme opinion gets lots of attention, as all good Internet trolls know. Kevin Marks puts Keen firmly in that camp, and so does Doc Searls.

Okay, maybe he doesn’t hate it — or at least not all of it. After all, the New Yorker and the BBC and the Oxford English Dictionary are available on the Internet, right? (or at least parts of them are). But it’s clear that Andrew Keen doesn’t like what the Web is doing to our Culture with a capital C, and that’s why he’s written a book called “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture.”

He joined us at globeandmail.com for a virtual Q&A session this afternoon, and I managed to pass along some questions from friends like Rachel Sklar and Eric Berlin. I wish I had had a bit more time to rustle up even more 🙂

To Keen, the current “Web 2.0” focus on interactivity and “user-generated content” (what a horrible term) — with blogs and wikis and forums and Digg-style voting and so on — is bordering on Marxism, as he wrote in a widely-circulated opinion piece last year. In other words, it celebrates the contribution of the individual regardless of whether that individual has any talent, and Keen believes that this is stamping out the finer things in our culture, which presumably include the opera, classic literature, the Philharmonic, etc., etc.

It’s easy to criticize Keen on any number of fronts. Lawrence Lessig takes Keen to task for criticizing the sloppiness in the “blogosphere” and then making exactly the same kinds of sloppy mistakes in his book. “Here’s a book,” Lessig writes, “that has passed through all the rigor of modern American publishing, yet which is perhaps as reliable as your average blog post: No doubt interesting, sometimes well written, lots of times ridiculously over the top — but also riddled with errors.”

Lessig concludes that the only possible answer is that Keen is “our generation’s greatest self-parodist.” He has also set up a Keen Reader wiki so that everyone can contribute their own errors from the book.

Assuming we are actually supposed to believe that Keen is serious, one thing he avoids in most of his arguments is that “user contributions” are a cornerstone of our democratic society. If the process of saying what you think of something (or someone) allegedly works for electing governments, why is it so absurd to apply those principles to the production of other things? No one is suggesting that works of art should be designed by committee — but the only people threatened by “user-generated content” or other Web 2.0-style features are those who have achieved their lofty status solely through being anointed by the cultural aristocracy.

Keen — who ran a dot-com that ultimately failed in the first bubble — says in the book that “Democratization, despite its lofty idealization, is undermining truth, souring civic discourse, and belittling expertise, experience, and talent.” I would argue the Internet helps to do the exact opposite — it helps to support truth (by making it easier to find errors), it improves discourse by broadening the available range of opinions and commentary (assuming you like that sort of thing, which Keen presumably doesn’t), and it helps to reveal expertise, experience and talent in places we may not have thought to look for it.

Yes, the Internet also produces a lot of sound and fury for no purpose — and there are a lot of idiots and pompous windbags that use the Web as a platform for misinformation or outright falsehood. In other words, the Internet is a reflection of humanity in all of its variety, both good and bad, and ultimately we find in it whatever we are looking for. Keen looks for the cheap and crass and useless, and he finds it. It’s too bad he isn’t helping us find the good stuff.

In a recent post, my friend Tony Hung of Deep Jive Interests has taken an audio interview that David “Everything is Miscellanous” Weinberger did with Craig Newmark of craigslist.org and concluded that Craig was essentially just in the right place at the right time and lucked into what has become one of the most successful online communities around — one that could be worth as much as $500-million, depending on how you measure such things.

As Tony describes it, “Craig Newmark is no visionary. He’s no guru. And he’s no soothsayer. He’s a guy who lucked into his business, and it continues to succeed in spite of his lackadaisical efforts at starting it and running it.” Because he was early, he gained a “first mover” advantage, Tony argues, and therefore developed network effects that now make the site virtually unassailable. But what really seems to tick Tony off — as it does most of Wall Street, I’m sure — is craigslist’s determination not to monetize itself:

“Not wanting to take advantage of an enormous opportunity to create an efficient business and maximize revenue — especially to do more Good … well, that doesn’t strike me as being wise. It just strikes me as being lazy.”

Lazy? Maybe. In fact, in his keynote with Mark Evans at the mesh conference last week — which we will hopefully have video of soon (and which Tony himself live-blogged ) — Buckmaster said laziness is actually one of the reasons why craigslist makes any money at all. He said implementing fees was one of the laziest ways to cut down on job-listing spam, instead of trying to come up with new and complex technological solutions. But it worked.

I think craigslist’s success is a lot more nuanced than Tony suggests. Yes, Craig was lucky with the timing — but I think that his and Jim Buckmaster’s laser-like focus on the user, without being distracted by the lure of AdSense and banners and pop-ups and so on, has a lot to do with why the site has become as successful as it has, and has stayed there.

If craigslist had gone the same route everyone else has, the uniqueness of the service would have been lost and it would have floundered and failed. You can’t separate one from the other.

(cross-posted from my Globe blog)

First it was “Brookers” — YouTube sensation Brooke Brodack, 20, who did skits in front of her web-cam and was signed to a TV development deal by Carson Daly Productions last year — and then came David Lehre, who is also developing comedy shorts and other material for MTV after his short films became popular on YouTube (Washington Post story here).

Now Justin Timberlake has signed YouTube singing sensation Esmee Denters to his fledgling record label Tennman Records, and will reportedly have her as his opening act in several European cities (she is from the Netherlands). Another female singer who calls herself Ysabella Brave has also been signed to a recording contract after a rise to popularity that has seen her video clips viewed more than 3 million times on YouTube (I wrote about her here).

Sandi Thom, a British singer who played shows in her apartment and streamed them over the Internet, was promoted as a Web sensation last year, but it turned out that she had already signed a contract before she started getting popular for the impromptu Internet shows.

In addition to Brookers and Lehre, other YouTube stars who have been signed to deals include Lisa Nova (who signed with The Daily Reel) and Little Loca (who signed to do a reality TV show with the CW network). And NBC said recently that it has signed three Web comedy stars — including one from YouTube and one from MySpace — to work on its new DotComedy website.

The TV blog NewTeeVee, meanwhile, says that William Sledd, a former Gap employee whose YouTube videos are number four on the most-subscribed list, has signed a deal with Bravo to bring his gay-themed clips to the channel’s website (the Los Angeles Times had a story recently).

Looks like the Web is becoming the farm team.

Now I am really famous: doing a laptop web-cam interview with none other than Loren Feldman of 1938media, who was on our Future of Media panel at mesh (thanks again, Loren). Unlike Rob, I asked Loren to keep his shirt on 🙂 Sorry about the whole table-shaking thing — that’s why I’m in print.

http://www.podtech.net/player/popup.jshttp://www.podtech.net/player/podtech-player.swf?bc=89df399c25944a3899f54dc0d22b4e5b

My friend Tony Hung from Deep Jive Interests — who was a one-man live-blogging machine at our recent mesh conference, as well as being on a panel (about the future of journalism, coincidentally enough) — has a great post about Yahoo’s sudden realization that search isn’t all that important any more. If those comments sound like sour grapes to you, you’re not the only one.

Tony’s point is that Yahoo is talking about how “personalization” is the future, rather than pure search, and to him (and me) that sounds a lot like what social networks such as Facebook do. So does Yahoo wish they had coughed up the $1-billion or whatever it was to buy Facebook when they had the chance? I expect they do. Imagine how thrilled they will be when Google does a deal to drive the search inside Facebook (not that I know anything, but I could see it happening at some point).

Go read Tony’s whole post. Thought-provoking.

I’ve seen a demo of BumpTop — the three-dimensional desktop/file interface developed by Anand Agarawala of Toronto as part of his master’s thesis at the University of Toronto — but watching him demo it at the TED conference adds a certain something. I’m trying to picture this somehow being merged with Jeff Han’s touch interface, or Microsoft’s “Surface” interface. Very cool. In case you’re interested, Anand also apparently does nerd-core rapping.

http://static.videoegg.com/ted/flash/loader.swf

Rex Sorgatz, who works for MSNBC and also writes an eclectic and insightful blog at Fimoculous.com, has launched something at the news site that I think is a great effort at harnessing Digg-style voting power in the context of a news event — and in a much more interesting way than the typical user poll or survey. It’s called iPredict (I’m going to forgive Rex the use of the now-ubiquitous “i” prefix), and it creates a real-time graph of user votes on a particular outcome, such as whether Harry Potter dies in the final book. You can see how many people voted and the history of earlier votes. Very cool. Rex has an overview of the thinking behind iPredict (and a great Marshall McLuhan quote) on his blog.