Keenian fallout
Rather predictably, various shards of shrapnel find themselves embedded within around the blogosphere after Andrew Keen’s lessons in Web 2.0 whackonomics last night. First up, Lloyd davies is shedding a few tears,
Andrew is a man who clearly gets something out of being (metaphorically) beaten up by one half of the audience while the other half looks on, amazed and puzzled by the rage of their usually rational fellows. I couldn’t help thinking that this is probably a situation Andrew has found himself in again and again. I felt very much like I was watching an unconscious videotape of the world according to Andrew Keen aged four and a half. He behaves like a picky child. “Don’t want this. Don’t want that. Don’t…. want”
The Press Gazette take a more measured look with not one, but two hitech audio embedded blog posts – wow,
Keen says this Web 2.0 crowd combines 1960s counter-culture anti-authoritarianism, with 1980s free-market capitalism and 1990s technophilia and want to replace traditional journalism with blogs. I suspect they would all dispute that characterisation in their different ways. A bit like his book, the good bits in the discussion were hidden away between sweeping generalisations (“bloggers don’t buy books” was my personal favourite) and personal jabs.
Samizdata tears into Polly Toynbee,
Andrew Keen: Are you comparing the Instapundit, the idiotic crazy libertarian ex-law professor, to Polly Toynbee and Robert Fisk? They are my heroes!
Adriana Lukas: No, I am not comparing Instapundit to Polly Toynbee or Robert Fisk. That would be unfair to Instapundit.
And talking of Instapundit, he ain’t too ‘appy either…
EX-LAW PROFESSOR? Andrew Keen knows as little about me as he does about the things he writes about. Which hasn’t stopped him from spamming me for attention. All he had to do was look at the bio in this review of his book — but maybe he didn’t read that far.
As Andrew Keen said on the night, “this book is a grenade”. And the shrapnel is all over London and beyond… next stop Bonn.