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There is no “first blogger”

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“It’s been 10 years since the blog was born,” said a Wall Street Journal headline on Saturday. The article that followed declared, “We are approaching a decade since the first blogger — regarded by many to be Jorn Barger — began his business of hunting and gathering links…”

The article admits that “The dating of the 10th anniversary of blogs, and the ascription of primacy to the first blogger, are imperfect exercises” — but it barely lifts a finger to try to sort out the truth. Writer Tunku Varadarajan really wouldn’t have had to look very far: Declan McCullagh’s CNET piece earlier this year was not perfect, but it got a lot more of the story right than Varadarajan did.

Who be these “many” who regard Barger as the first blogger? Can Varadarajan name a single one? Barger’s Robot Wisdom was indeed the first site to call itself a “Weblog.” (“Blog” came later, via Peter Merholz.) But Barger was nowhere near the first person to create a Web page with frequent updates sorted in reverse chronological order — if you wish to define “blog” on the basis of that key design feature. Dave Winer’s Scripting News was going full bore well before Barger’s site started up; Winer, in turn was preceded by semi-bloggish sites like Ric Ford’s Macintouch.

Others choose to define blogging more in terms of content. (None of them names Barger as the first blogger, either.) The problem is that, from this angle, too, there are multiple roots: blogs are commonly vehicles for self-revelation — so maybe Justin Hall, the inspiring pioneer of link-filled Web diaries, was the ur-blogger. But others see the heart of blogging as being the assembly of a list of annotated links — in which case the first blog might well be, as Dave Winer has said, Tim Berners-Lee’s very first web page at CERN. (Similarly, Marc Andreessen jokes that the original NCSA “What’s New” page from 1993 was his first blog.) Then there are those who see blogs primarily as fast-moving sources for news and rumors; these people (I tend to disagree with them, but they’re out there) will typically point to Matt Drudge as a blogging progenitor.

Since the Journal article came out, the blogosphere’s self-correction mechanism has been going at full tilt. As happens in this medium, lots of good suggestions are coming to light.

Still, I think there’s a lot of needless effort being dedicated toward a pointless goal — the identification of a “first” that is really only of use to old-fashioned editors eager to fill slow-news days with anniversary features.

The hunt for “the first blog” or “the day blogging started” will be in vain. Like many significant phenomena in our world, blogging does not have a single point of origin. Blogging as we know it today slowly accreted from multiple input streams. It’s a set of practices built around a set of tools, and the practices and tools co-evolved. There are a handful of central figures in the story. They’re all important. Why argue about “firsts” when the thing whose first instance you are hunting down is impossible to strictly define?

The Journal piece, which included brief essays by a dozen celebrities and high-profile bloggers, tilts heavily toward the political wing of the blogosphere, which is only one galaxy in this continuously expanding multiple universe. That distortion is perhaps understandable from a newspaper that lies at the nexus of conservative American power and money. But, sheesh, ye Journal-ites, you ought to get your facts right.

Ironically, the Journal’s biggest-name essayist, Tom Wolfe, arrogantly dismisses the blogosphere for its “narcissistic shrieks and baseless ‘information.'” His chief complaint, oddly, is aimed not at blogs at all but at Wikipedia, which apparently contains an anecdote about him that he says is false (I should say “contained” — the page has of course been updated based on his complaint).

Blogs, Wikipedia, what’s the difference? To Tom, it’s all that crazy stuff on the Internet, and to hell with it. Plainly, we should forget about what we read online and trust titans like the Journal — they’re so rock-solid reliable on the facts!
[tags]blogs, blogging, web history[/tags]

Nielsen vs. Andreessen on blogging

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Over here, first, in this corner, we’ve got usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen is telling us that smart people will forget about blogging and write articles. Blogs, says Nielsen, are a dime a dozen. If you want to “demonstrate world-class expertise,” write long, in-depth articles that you can get people to pay for.

“Blog postings,” says Nielsen, “will always be commodity content: there’s a limit to the value you can provide with a short comment on somebody else’s comments.” Note how the definition has shifted without notice: all blog posts have somehow become “short comments on somebody else’s comments.”

As the article continues, Nielsen explains that his advice is aimed at the person who wants to establish that he is the number-one expert among the thousand bloggers in a field. This quantitative focus is awfully crude: among 1000 specialists, who’s to say there is a “number one”? By what measure? You’re going to find a whole range of sub-specialists and eccentrics, deep-niche experts and synthesizing generalists. But Nielsen’s analysis is built around this sort of comparative ranking. He maintains that, since blog posts are so variable in quality, a blog will never do a good job of showcasing your expertise. If you want to be top dog, make sure your barks are long and full of detailed research.

But Nielsen’s tract isn’t actually about how to become a “world-class expert” or even how to broadcast one’s world-class-expert-hood. It’s about the most efficient way to get people to pay for your content. Nielsen starts from the assumption that your goal isn’t self-expression or persuasion or enjoyment or anything besides customer acquisition. People won’t pay for blogs; therefore, blogging is a waste of time.

But no blogger I’ve ever heard of has actually tried to charge for content (tip jars are the closest anyone’s come). No one seems to want to do so; it runs counter to blogging’s DNA. Long, in-depth articles are a wonderful thing; who would dismiss their value? But Nielsen blithely dismisses the value in 999 out of a thousand blogs. He doesn’t seem to understand that, most of the time, that value is created not in hope of finding paying customers but, simply, for love.

Now then: here, in the other corner, we have Marc Andreessen. He’s the guy who whipped up the first popular Web browser for personal computers. In 2003 he rashly dissed the need for blogging, saying, “I have a day job. I don’t have the time or ego need.”

But he’s come around, and in the past few weeks he’s poured a huge amount of thought and energy into an impressive new blog. Yesterday, in a post titled “Eleven lessons learned about blogging, so far,” Andreessen wrote, “It is crystal clear to me now that at least in industries where lots of people are online, blogging is the single best way to communicate and interact”:

Writing a blog is way easier than writing a magazine article, a published paper, or a book — but provides many of the same benefits.

I think it’s an application of the 80/20 rule — for 20% of the effort (writing a blog post but not editing and refining it the quality level required of a magazine article, a published paper, or a book), you get 80% of the benefit (your thoughts are made available to interested people very broadly).

Arguably blogging is better because the distribution of a blog can be even broader than a magazine article, a published paper, or a book, at least in cases where the article/paper/book is restricted by a publisher to a limited readership base.

Andreessen obviously isn’t writing his blog with any intent to try to charge people for it (as one of the founders of Netscape he presumably doesn’t need that kind of change). I doubt, either, that he is blogging in order to be known as the one-in-a-thousand expert on anything. So Nielsen would tell him, don’t bother — don’t waste your time.

Andreessen doesn’t look likely to heed such counsel. Certainly, as a tech-industry celebrity, he’s had it relatively easy in attracting attention and readers. But he’s hardly coasting. His posts, in fact, look suspiciously like the long, in-depth articles Nielsen advocates; they just happen to be posted in blog form.

From what I can tell, Andreessen is blogging because he finds it fun. Because it connects him to a wider group of people who share his interests. Because it gives him a chance to think out loud and tell war stories and give advice. And because, having started, he can’t stop writing (long, in-depth) posts.

It looks a lot like love.
[tags]jakob nielsen, marc andreessen, blogging[/tags]

Dogs, cats and Times blogs

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Professional journalists, even those who do a solid job of covering the Net industry, can’t help occasionally spraying droplets of disdain at the explosion of blogging, self-publishing and uploaded photos and videos that marks the Web’s current phase. Consider this passage from a piece by Brad Stone in today’s Times about MySpace’s new video service:

The company’s plan underscores its particular emphasis on professional video, as opposed to the homemade depictions of wrestling dogs and cats — the genre known as user-generated content — that are more prominent on most video sites.

There you have the dichotomy: video is either professional stuff, or it’s “wrestling dogs and cats.”

If you’ve spent any time on YouTube — or with any other popular “user-generated content” service — you know how narrow and inadequate that description is. Sure, you got your wrestling dogs and cats. But they no more devalue the wide spectrum of material on YouTube than, say, the daily crossword puzzle in the Times reduces the rest of the paper to mere pastime. The reality of “user-generated content” (itself a reductive media-biz term for a phenomenon that is bigger and richer than the media-biz understands) does not justify the dismissive hand-wave this passage signifies.

It’s particularly ironic to read this on the very same day that the Times unveils its new group tech blog, Bits. The newspaper’s senior Valley correspondent, John Markoff, has long made a practice of telling people who ask why he doesn’t start a blog that he already has one — “it’s called the New York Times.” So of course the first thing I did was to find his byline on the blog.

In a post introducing the new feature, Saul Hansell was smart enough to include that anecdote as his lead — inoculating Bits from any mockery on that basis from the peanut gallery (mine or any one else’s). So far it looks like a good effort: the reporters are linking out and writing a little informally and beginning to get into the spirit. (There’s no point in blogging if the prose reads like wire-service copy.) I still think they need to let their hair down a bit more. But it’s a start.
[tags]new york times, john markoff, user generated content[/tags]

PC World: Feel the love

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Many thanks to the kind editors at PC World for naming this humble blog as one of its “100 Blogs We Love.”

PC World recently made headlines when its editor, Harry McCracken, resigned to protest ad-sales meddling in the publication’s editorial side. He was later reinstated and the CEO he tangled with got kicked upstairs. It was one of those perennial showdowns between editorial and business that have always marked the magazine world — and now appear to be beginning to infiltrate the blogosphere as well. (In fact, here’s McCracken’s take on the FM “People Ready” controversy: “Journalists shouldn’t write ad copy.” Of course, there are bloggers who think of themselves as journalists, and many others who don’t.)

The PC World blurb said that my “take on tech, politics, culture, and the intersections thereof is often unexpected, and always worth reading.” I’ll try to keep living up to that description.
[tags]pc world, harry mccracken, blogging[/tags]

Conversations with corporations

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This is getting interesting!

John Battelle has posted a reasonable defense of the Federated Media “conversational ad” scheme that I discussed earlier. (And it strikes a healthily non-defensive tone, too, which is awfully hard in such a situation.) He argues that he views “commercial publications” as conversations between three parties: authors, audiences and advertisers.

Well, OK. You know who the authors are; they sign their writing. You know who you are, as a member of the audience. But who, exactly, is the advertiser? That is the problem with Battelle’s formulation, as I see it.

Blogging presupposes a notion of direct communication between writer and reader, where there is no editor or intermediary bureaucracy between the two, and where the reader, as often as not, is also a blogger, ready to respond — to participate in the “conversation.”

But this advertiser-as-conversationalist thing, I’m still having a hard time with it. If you look at the “People Ready” conversation page that FM and Microsoft created, where, exactly, is Microsoft joining the conversation? I see lots of names here, but no name representing Microsoft. If you click through to the “About People Ready” page, you can read stuff like, “Microsoft sees a better way to unlock the potential of every person.” But, er, who exactly is Microsoft?

In a comment posted on Jeff Jarvis’s blog, Battelle elaborates:

Is it somehow illegal for companies to be part of a conversation? I really find that presumption offensive. Why can’t companies, which as the Cluetrain reminds us are just made up of people, be part of a conversation, and invite leader into that conversation?

I have only one problem with this argument: A corporation is not (pace the late 19th-century legal doctrine that held corporations to have the same rights as individuals) a person. There are plenty of individual people who work for corporations. (I do, too.) And when they post in online forums or start blogs or do anything that they sign their name to, I’m very happy to have a conversation with them. But that’s different from “companies being part of a conversation.” I don’t know how to do that. And I really don’t see that happening with the “People Ready” campaign.

A deep irony here is that Microsoft, of all the big tech companies, has a long and proud record of promoting blogging among its engineers and executives. I’ve learned a vast amount by reading them, and their presence online — including the famous Robert Scoble (who weighs in on this controversy here, and who of course has long since moved on from Microsoft) but extending far beyond him — has changed my understanding of the company and the people who work for it. Microsoft is already part of a panoply of real conversations on the Web. That makes this “People Ready” construct look all the more artificial.

UPDATE: More from Matthew Ingram:

If I’m talking to a bunch of people in a bar, and an advertising guy working for Coke comes up and tries to change the subject to the idea of “refreshment,” and says that he plans to tape-record my comments and use them on a billboard, then I am going to react pretty negatively to that idea. That’s not a “conversation” the way I would define it.

[tags]people ready, federated media, ethics, blogging[/tags]

Are advertorials “blog-ready”?

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In the murky annals of “advertorial” — the blurring of clear lines between independent editorial matter and advertising — the dustup over Federated Media’s campaign on behalf of Microsoft’s “People Ready” slogan will rank as a minor affair. But it’s a useful flashpoint for looking at a central divergence in perspectives on blogging.

Federated Media, John Battelle’s ad network for high-traffic blogs, gathered a constellation of star tech-and-biz pundits who are part of its network, got them to offer comments on the theme of Microsoft’s campaign, and assembled those quotes on a Web site. Valleywag cried foul. FM refers to the technique as a “conversational marketing campaign”; the approach is really the Web equivalent of a magazine advertorial. Advertorials — including advertorials that involve a publication’s editorial staff — have been around a long time, and while they can be abused, they are hardly cause for deep moral indignation, as long as they are clearly labeled (FM’s is) and not trying to confuse readers.

On the other hand, if you run advertorials, I think you make it much harder to present yourself as the leader of any kind of business revolution. When advertisers ask for an advertorial, they typically want to confuse readers; they’re admitting that traditional ads aren’t working for them, and they’re asking for the editors or bloggers to lend an ad a bit of the content producers’ credibility — or at least ability to attract readers’ attention. This is fundamentally an old-media game.

FM and others working at the edge of new-media business models argue that they’re helping advertisers and marketers “join a conversation.” Maybe so. But the best conversations aren’t plotted by ad buyers; they’re spontaneous.

Ironically, of course, it’s the conversation about this ad campaign (Mike Arrington defends the ad, Om Malik retreats from it, Dave Winer says the bloggers may be “clouding their integrity”) that is attracting multiple posts –including, yeah, this one — and landing the controversy at the top of sites like Techmeme. So maybe FM and Microsoft knew exactly what they were doing. Maybe Nick Denton and Valleywag are in on the deal, too! (No, no, of course not: joke.)

What I find interesting in this debate is that there remains, nearly a decade into the history of blogging, a philosophical divide: Some see blogging as simply a young format for media business — and, like Federated Media or Valleywag’s owner Gawker Media, building ad-based publications on blogging platforms. Others stubbornly continue to see blogging as a uniquely new creative endeavor that puts bloggers in direct touch with readers, cutting out media-biz middle-manning. Anyone in the latter camp is going to squawk at the arrival of the blog-advertorial — not only because it’s corrupt to them, but because it’s old hat.

The people at Federated Media are smart, and I’ll give them credit for trying out new ad approaches in a not-obviously-corrupt way. If this one doesn’t work, I’m sure they’ll keep trying. But I’m skeptical of the introduction of what are, essentially, magazine-biz norms into the blogosphere. Because eventually that road ends with blogs becoming independent online magazines, and I’ve been at that game long enough to know how hard it is.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis — whose blog is repped by Federated Media — weighs in at length, concluding:

It’s the bloggers who must make these calls. That’s because advertisers will be advertisers; they will try to push for more integration with us (and we should beware taking that as flattery). And sales people will be sales people; they will try hard to get the sale. So we bloggers are left, inevitably, with the need to say no.

[tags]federated media, advertorial, microsoft, people powered, blogging[/tags]

The blog-dimmed tide is loosed!

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The backlash against Web 2.0 in all its manifestations — blogging, Wikipedia, “user-generated content,” citizen journalism and so on — seems to be hitting full tilt.

At the front of this parade, debating anyone he can persuade to share a podium, is Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur. Keen’s critique has already raised mountains of ire, from people including Dan Gillmor, Dave Winer, and Terry Heaton (who calls it “a whining, outrageous and defensive fantasy based on sweeping generalizations, falsehoods, paranoia and a form of condescension so pissy that it blinds the author to anything resembling reality”). I’m still planning to read the book soon and I’ll let you know whether I agree.

Next comes Nick Carr, who’s got a new book heading our way titled The Big Switch: Our New Digital Destiny. Carr is a contrarian by nature who often takes a cynical view of Web 2.0 phenomena a la Keen, but from what I can tell his book intends a more high-altitude portrait of the transformation of computing from a desktop-centric world to the Web-based universe.

Then there is Michael Gorman, the American Library Association honcho known for his broadsides against “the Blog People.” Gorman turns up this week in a “Web 2.0 Forum” organized by the Encyclopedia Britannica, which has been wrestling with the challenges it faces — intellectual, financial and institutional — in the wake of Wikipedia’s success. Gorman sees the rise of Web 2.0-style interaction ushering in a new dark ages, a “Sleep of Reason” –which, Goya fans know, “begets monsters.”

Keen and Carr are both participating in this forum as well. It couldn’t be that Britannica is stacking its expert deck, now, could it? Perhaps they should invite Kevin Kelly, whose civil but devastating retorts to Keen in this dialogue deserve wider currency. (Clay Shirky is in there, at any rate, handily dismantling Gorman’s self-contradictions.)

In any case, this is an important debate, worth mulling over — however crude some of the original contributions may be — and it’s not going to end any time soon. Early next year, for instance, we’ll get a new book on a similar theme from my Salon colleague Farhad Manjoo (now blogging as Salon’s Machinist). Farhad’s book examines similar questions of authority, trust and credibility in new media as Keen, but he does so less as a culture critic than through the lens of social science and psychology. (I’ve had the pleasure of reading an early manuscript, and though I don’t agree with everything in it, it’s a wonderful read, full of insight and valuable nuggets of research.)

Regardless of how you feel about all these issues, it’s hard to miss one meta-elephant in the room: The members of this phalanx of Web 2.0 cynics have all chosen to deliver their critiques via the very form that their rhetoric detests. Keen promotes his book from his blog. Carr weaves his ideas on his blog. Gorman explains what’s wrong with the “Blog People,” where? On a blog hosted by Britannica.

What’s the thinking here: First join them, then beat them?

However dangerous to the polity the tools of Web 2.0 may be, it seems that they are perfectly well-suited to providing a platform for assaults upon themselves. Which tells me that they may be considerably more resilient, and socially salutary, than their critics allow.
[tags]web 2.0, andrew keen, cult of the amateur, nicholas carr, michael gorman, encyclopedia britannica[/tags]

Interview: David Weinberger

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This seems to have been my “interview very smart people” month. A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to spend an hour talking with David Weinberger about his fascinating new book, Everything Is Miscellaneous. The full interview with Weinberger is now up at Salon.

I highly recommend the book: it’s a sophisticated, deep discussion of one of the issues that the Chandler developers in Dreaming in Code were grappling with, as they tried to break personal digital information out of application-based “silos” to create the sort of “miscellaneous soup” that Weinberger celebrates.

Everything is MiscellaneousIf I have any disagreement with Weinberger, it’s that I think he is so enthusiastic about the manifold opportunities digital organization presents — and so gifted at explaining them to us — that he is a little dismissive of the frictional drag created by practical implementation details. He makes a compelling theoretical case for “third order” systems that let us try out multiple organizational schemas. But in practice I think a lot of this stuff remains out of reach and will continue to do so for a long while. In my and I think many users’ experiences, the sheer difficulty of creating good software means that the digital realm remains far less responsive to our changing needs than is modeled in Everything is Miscellaneous. To paraphrase the great William Gibson line, the miscellaneous is here — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

Following the break, a relevant chunk of the interview which didn’t make the cut for Salon (pretty high geek quotient).
[Read more…]

Interview: Howard Rheingold

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As an adviser to Jay Rosen’s newassignment.net I thought the best way to help the project, and learn in the process, would be to participate. So I signed up to interview Howard Rheingold for NewAssignment’s Assignment Zero, a crowdsourced inquiry into the nature of crowdsourcing.

The full interview is now posted. I didn’t, in truth, do things a whole lot differently than I’d do them were I conducting the interview for Salon or any other more conventional outlet. What may be less conventional is what happens to this material from here on in. My interview was one of dozens that are now up at the Zero site. The material is going to be somehow shaped by Assignment Zero itself, and also I think for Wired, and it will be fascinating to see how Jay and his staff orchestrate everything. It’s not the pure anarchy of the blogosphere; it’s not the traditional writer/editor pipeline of the old-fashioned newsroom. It’s — something we might be discovering. Or at least learning about.

It was a pleasure talking to Rheingold about the state of the participatory Web. I have always found him far less a starry-eyed idealist or utopian than he is sometimes painted. He’s been thinking about how technology and online social practices “coevolve” longer than virtually anyone else, and his perspective continues to be incisive and challenging. Here’s a choice passage:

Crowdsourcing is a name for something that’s new. And the name is connected to the business world. So it’s going to have that connotation. I’m going to bet that “crowdsourcing” is what most people know it as five years from now. And “non-market-incented commons-based peer production” is going to be for professors. Good marketing is engineering memes that really work. You can’t argue with that.

[tags]howard rheingold, technology, crowdsourcing, assignment zero, newassignment.net[/tags]

Amateur hour

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“Is it always like this?” A business acquaintance who I chatted with briefly at the Berkeley Cybersalon earlier this evening asked me as the panel discussion — titled “New Media Wars: Amateur versus Auteur” — wound down.

“Quite often, actually,” I answered him.

I assumed he was referring to the heated back-and-forth between the attendees and the panelists — and, occasionally, among the panelists themselves (Dan Gillmor, Katie Hafner, Robert Scoble and Andrew Keen). The event’s hook was Keen’s new book, “The Cult of the Amateur.” Keen’s self-described “polemic” is not yet available, and I haven’t read it, so I won’t comment directly on it. But the book’s subtitle tells you where Keen’s coming from: “How today’s Internet is killing our culture.”

Keen said his book was “designed as a grenade,” but this wasn’t really an explosive discussion — partly because, hey, nobody except the people on the panel had had a chance to read his book, but even more because the whole discussion was fragmented into the many shards of today’s complex debate over “old vs. new media.” There is no one argument — instead, many cross-conversations. And they were all represented tonight.

There’s “What’s wrong with the professional media”: Many people still get much of their information from the pros, but they feel more and more that the professional media either (a) doesn’t portray the world the way they see it (Kaliya Hamlin said she was at the Seattle WTO protests in 1999, and what she saw isn’t what the New York Times reported); or (b) gets too much factual stuff wrong to deserve its pedestal. Blogging, Dave Winer told the journalists in the room, is simply “your sources going around the blockage.”

There’s “what’s wrong with blogging”: Bloggers typically work alone, they don’t have travel budgets and editors, they lack both the institutional framework and the professional tradition to support the creation of a full report on the events of the world. Keen’s critique goes further; he says bloggers are “either irreverent, narcissistic or pornographic.” (I think he probably meant “irrelevant” but was typing too fast. Or maybe, in Keen’s world — he advocates a grand restoration of elite authority — “irreverent” is a put-down.)

There’s “how do we rescue journalism now that the business model is falling apart” — complete with mentions of newsroom layoffs, arguments about Craigslist’s impact on classified ad revenue, and laments about the importance of rescuing in-depth journalism from the wreckage of the newspaper business.

These conversations are happening almost exclusively among media people and media obsessives. Meanwhile there’s a wider conversation taking place on the Net among bloggers and participants in Web communities that has very little to do with journalism at all; it’s basically people talking to one another. At several points in the discussion tonight people got up to make this point, including one woman (I didn’t catch her name; she talked about participating in the community of mother-bloggers) who said, “I don’t know what Internet you guys are on” — and wondered how what she was doing could be considered narcissistic when so much of it involved paying attention to other people’s stories.

These conversations are all taking place orthogonally, and progress is limited. Indeed, the discussion tonight dribbled off into a consensus embrace of the notion of “media literacy”: the media have degenerated, so now, it seems, the consumers of media had better shape up!

Of course, the smarter people are at evaluating what they read, the better. But saying the answer to the crisis in journalism today is “better media literacy” is like saying the answer to the crisis in education is “better learning skills.”

Keen has lobbed his bombs before — and in the same place, yet — but I find it hard to take them seriously. (I should mention that he did a podcast interview with me about my book — and he’s charming when he’s not lobbing grenades and building stockades around the ancien regime.) I don’t think he honestly believes that, as his book’s subtitle has it, “The Internet is killing our culture.” Ironically, of course, Keen himself used his own blog as a launch pad for his ideas. He admitted tonight that he is, himself, an “amateur writer.” He claims to be motivated by a desire to “annoy libertarians of the left and libertarians of the right.”

Something tells me he might win a little less attention but a lot more credibility if he stopped trying so hard to annoy. There must be some valuable criticism lodged among all the bluster. When I read “The Cult of the Amateur” I’ll let you know what I find. But I can tell you right now that a book I have read — David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous — offers persuasive (and entertaining!) counter-arguments to those of Keen’s blunderbuss Internet put-downs that I’ve already heard.

UPDATE: I’d forgotten that Winer posted a review of Keen’s book way back in February:

His book, while based on an important and valuable premise, that Silicon Valley is too-much admired for the good of all of us, including the tech industry, fails to enlighten while he props up the egos of obsolete people and businesses. Each of his arguments is easily refuted, too easily.

FURTHER UPDATE: The blogger who asked “what Internet you guys are on” (and who made what I thought was one of the most valuable contributions of the evening) is Grace Davis.

OTHER REPORTS: Dan Farber; Robert Scoble; Renee Blodget.

[tags]berkeley cybersalon, andrew keen, blogging, cult of the amateur[/tags]