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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.

Online music service Lala.com — which until recently was aimed at trading music CDs — has remade itself in a rather dramatic way by launching a free music-streaming service that automatically syncs with your iPod, and by signing a licensing deal with Warner Brothers Records. As Gizmodo describes it, Lala scans all the music you own — whether it’s from ripped CDs or downloaded music in iTunes — and then lets you listen to it anywhere (streaming through your Web browser) for free. In other words, it assumes that you own it. Lala founder Bill Nguyen has a string of startups on his resume, including Onebox.com, which he sold in 2000 for $850-million.

In addition to the free streaming service, Lala has a pay-for-download store, which (at least to begin with) will be selling only albums — for between $6.50 and $13.50 each — rather than individual songs. Lala is clearly hoping that the appeal of free streaming will convince users to adopt the service and then they will be more likely to buy music there as well. As an added feature, Lala has also developed a way of letting you “sideload” music into your iPod through your browser, without having to download it and then import it into iTunes. The service apparently only works with iPods.

It will be interesting to see whether Lala’s streaming service gets slammed by the major record labels (apart from Warner, of course, which seems to be willing to take a leap of faith that it will lead to more downloads). Michael Robertson, the serial entrepreneur behind services such as The Gizmo Project and Linspire — a Linux-based alternative to Windows — tried something similar several years ago with Mp3.com and was effectively shut down by legal threats from the music industry.

His service allowed you to put a CD in your computer, have it scanned and then immediately listen to the music from it without having to rip and upload it all to the company’s servers (Mp3.com ripped CDs and created a library of songs). Lala’s service is slightly different in that someone has to upload the songs — but each song only has to be uploaded once. Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Freedom Foundation, says this may help protect the service from legal attacks.

“This is different from what MP3.com was up to with BeamIt (and for which they were sued) because the *initial* copy is uploaded by the users. MP3.com made the initial copies themselves.

Why does this matter? Because of the DMCA safe harbor that applies to hosting material on behalf of users. Pretty clever lawyering — wish I’d thought of that back in 1999.”

A more recent service Robertson launched called AnywhereCD lets you buy a CD and immediately download the tracks as non-DRM-protected mp3 files (the CD is delivered by regular mail). Although the service had a licensing arrangement with Warner Brothers, the record label forced AnywhereCD to remove its music by filing a lawsuit against the company (AnywhereCD has counter-sued). AnywhereCD also allows you to “sideload” songs into your iTunes, into a locker at another Robertson-owned music service called Mp3tunes.com or onto a mobile device.

Lala’s bet is definitely a risky one — and an expensive one: the company, which has raised $14-million from several venture capital groups including Bain Capital, says it expects to pay more than $140-million to the record industry over the next couple of years, and admits it will likely lose about $40-million in the period. Sounds like a great business model, doesn’t it?

In the end, Lala faces the same challenges as any other music service (apart from the dumb name, of course): will it be able to offer enough variety and selection to appeal to enough users to make it worthwhile? To me, one of the big issues is the album-only part — I think people have gotten a little too used to buying individual songs for that to fly (I know I have). It also remains to be seen whether Apple will get upset that the sideloading feature effectively bypasses its iTunes software (Susan Kevorkian of IDC says Apple may be just fine with it).

Would free streaming and the sideloading feature make you likely to try Lala? Jupiter Research analyst David Card has some thoughts here, and Liz Gannes at GigaOm says Lala should be congratulated for taking a risk.