Who's Your Data?

Andrew Keen apparently hates the very idea of somebody like me writing this blog. That is unless in the very last chapter of the book (which I did not read) he yells “April Fools” and jumps out of a cake. Or to be more accurate and less amateurish…he jumps out of the cake first and then yells “April Fools”.

The premise of Cult of the Amateur is that me and my ilk are taking jobs away from legitimate writers, downloading music at the expense of the artists and even worse reviewing movies and books that we have absolutely no business commenting on (oops). By the way this last weekend my wife and I saw Stardust, the movie adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s fantasy novel. It was very well done (oops again).

It is hard to know where to start with Keen’s elitist nonsense (I have no right to that opinion). Keen believes that Web 2.0 is the root of all evil, but I am not sure why. Apparently he never got the memo about the “democratization” of information. Or if he did get the memo he thought it was so poorly written that he threw it away.

I will just comment on one of his early rants in the book about Wikipedia. He said there was a lot of bad information on Wikipedia. Keen contrasted that to Encyclopedia Britannica, professional newspaper reporters, etc. I have read so much bad information in newspapers and in magazines that I am literally typing with one hand at this moment and scratching my head with the other hand.

I referenced Wikipedia twice today. The first time to check a few definitions for a network analysis I was working on and the second time to get an overview of top secret government security clearances. I know enough about both topics to feel confident that the info was accurate enough for my purposes. I will not be downloading blueprints for a nuclear reactor from Wiki…on the other hand; I have no plans to build a nuclear reactor.

After reading all but the last chapter my amateur opinion of Cult of the Amateur is that Andrew Keen wants to be provocative…just like the bloggers he hate.