Keen vs. Weinberger: The Plot (by Amateurs) Against America

Here's a comment by John Biggs of CrunchGear

I can only wish I was able to write in as witty a style as he does and oh, yeah as a bonus he also throws in a punch at Murdoch!

Why is this man smiling?

I was on my way to the outhouse with some print-outs of the WSJ opinion page — the newsprint version is too harsh — when I noticed an interview between Andrew Keen, writer of The Cult of the Amateur, and David Weinberger, author of Everything is Miscellaneous.

Mr. Keen’s argument runs in the cranky old man watching Elvis on Ed Sullivan vein. He believes blogging and all this Web 2.0 razamatazz is a bunch of Commie hoo-ha and in his day you used to have to go to the library to look up the long-winded ramblings of an accredited critic, scientist, or guy-who-writes-encylopediast to get information on a topic, not some hoopty-doopty hippity hoppity kid out in Kansas with a keyboard and some moxie, by gum, whose only interests include letting dogs pee on Mr. Keen’s lawn and preventing him from getting a good night’s sleep thanks to all the Web 2.0 bordello parties they’re having down the street. Mr. Weinberger thinks Web 2.0 is cool.

Watch the sparks fly as these two UFC-certified intellectuals spar on Murdoch’s future dumping ground. Roar!

How 7 Basic Human Needs are Driving the New Social Web2.0

is the title of an excellent blog post in Influential Interactive Marketing. It touches on a number of key aspects in the fast changing web landscape described today in its many manifestations under the catch-all term of web 2.0.

As the hype surrounding it seems to peak, the inevitable evolution of technology is already moving in the direction of an ever more "common sense" web or the "semantic web" which involves the use of software agents to collect natural language information from disparate sources throughout the web and then puts those elements together in various ways for people to use that information more effectively and extract greater meaning from it.