With 'experts' like this, who needs amateurs?

Andrew Keen is one of the better known pop-critics of Web 2.0 and he is worried that the internet is creating a culture that no longer values expertise.

Keen is completely dismissive of claims by so-called "digital utopians" who he believes see in Web 2.0 the fulfillment of their Marxist, libertarian, relativist, post-modern, or counter-enlightenment philosophies. (If web 2.0 could create agreement between all of those camps that in itself would be impressive.)

Says Keen:

These enabling technologies have simply reopened America’s old wounds about the role and meaning of intellectual authority, economic privilege, social class, cultural authority, and political power. The debate about the value of social media is really a conversation about the legitimacy of our free-market meritocracy.

and:

I believe in a meritocracy in which our individual worth is valued by our professional accomplishments.

But regardless of whether or not you agree with him about meritocracy, Keen's arguments are simply not convincing on his own terms. Even if you accept his preference for traditional expertise, his analysis of the web gets it wrong on both the theoretical and the practical level.

First, the theoretical:

I argue that Web 2.0’s gatekeeper-free media—without professional fact checkers, grammarians, and publishers—is by definition less accurate, reliable, and honest than professionally edited newspapers, encyclopedias, or books.

There are a couple of things worth noting about that statement. First, the claim that we now live in a gatekeeper-free media environment is controversial. Sure, everyone can publish their views, but not everyone's views are heard equally. Google is a new kind of gatekeeper, but Keen doesn't bother to consider what this means for his argument.

Second, I take issue with the claim that today's media environment should be viewed as, by definition, less accurate, reliable, and honest than our pre-2.0 media.

Personal blogs, Twitter, and Wikipedia exist in a media environment alongside traditional sources of "expert" information like The New York Times. Keen refers multiple times to Harvard professors whom he trusts more than anonymous teenagers. But the web has empowered the Harvard professor every bit as much as it has everyone else. (He admits as much towards the end of the article.)

The question, then, is whether an information environment containing both traditional experts and amateurs is intrinsically worse than an information environment that contains only the former.

I argue that it is not.

In practice, Keen is concerned that all the amateurism of web 2.0 is keeping us from finding quality expert content:

We really are all journalists and writers and filmmakers now—which means, in practice, that genuinely valuable journalism and writing get lost in all the self-authored junk on the internet.

But this statement isn't borne out by the literature on the structure and organization of the web. If anything, it's the self-authored "junk" that gets lost in the process of organizing content through search and through link patterns, which follow a winner-take-all power-law distribution. (Expert analysis on this topic here here and here.)

In fact, it's never been easier to find expert content. Universities are making their courses available for free online and professors from all over the world are blogging.

Thanks to the web, we are living in the age of Public Intellectual 2.0.

But Keen seems content to ignore the fact that amateur expression lives alongside of expert content, and that the web makes it easier, not harder, to find experts.

He'd prefer to exist in his own narrative in which he stands for the preservation of quality, culture, and intellectualism.

And that's fine. Thanks to Web 2.0 he can publish all he wants.

But given how easy it is to find more serious (and, yes, more expert) analysis of the way the web really works, I won't be adding Andrew Keen to my RSS reader any time soon.

Elite Social Networking

In the fall of 2006, during my senior year of college, I took a career class that aimed to help students recognize their interests and successfully navigate the job search process. During the course my teacher invited us to join a new, invite-only social networking site called Doostang.

At the time, the invite to Doostang seemed like a great opportunity. Time Magazine said it was "Facebook for the Morgan Stanley crowd." Though I had no interest in Morgan Stanley or the world of finance, the exclusivity of the site still somehow seemed to be a feature rather than a bug.

But the site proved difficult to use. Many of the job listings could not be accessed unless you had successfully brought in 10 new users to Doostang. This was only a couple of years ago, but most of the people I knew thought of social networking as a quick way to lose a job, not get one.

Unable to attract the requisite number of new users, I soon stopped signing into Doostang, and I had completely forgotten about it until the class reading on LinkedIn.

It appears that Doostang still exists, and perhaps it fills a niche. But I think I'd of been better served if my teacher had just sent me to LinkedIn and insisted I join.

Buying Conversation

This post is a sponsored post on behalf of Kmart via Izea. The opinions are mine.

The text above stirred up a lot of controversy when it appeared before a post about Kmart by social media blogger Chris Brogan.

It's an example of "sponsored conversation," when a company pays a blogger to post about its products. To many, something about this seems wrong. But in March, Josh Bernoff, author of the best-selling social media book Groundswell and VP of Forrester Research, blogged in support of the idea, so long as it is done carefully. Writes Bernoff:

The challenge, of course, is can bloggers do this and retain any credibility?
We believe they can, if -- and only if -- they obey two rules.

1. They must disclose that they are being paid.
2. They must be able to write whatever they want, positive or negative.

Brogan also emphasizes disclosure in a lengthy post defending himself and his Kmart post.

Not everyone agrees. ReadWriteWeb responded with a post titled Forrester is Wrong About Paying Bloggers, arguing that:

Blogging is a beautiful thing. The prospect of this young media being overrun with "pay for play" pseudo-shilling is not an attractive one to us.

I, too, am greatly troubled by the thought of bloggers competing to write sponsored posts about products, because of the inevitable pressure they would face to write positive reviews in order to continue to receive sponsorship opportunities.

I also think that Bernoff and Forrester are right that the big question is whether or not a blogger can participate in sponsored conversations while maintaining authenticity. If it turns out that it's not really possible for a blogger to balance the two, then sponsored conversations won't make much sense for either bloggers or marketers.

But what if the practice persists? Should we accept it? Or should we frown upon it and remove sponsored bloggers from our daily reading?

Crowdsourcing turned inside-out

This is a long post, so let me summarize: crowdsourcing lets companies outsource tasks to the crowd. But there's another new production model that does just the opposite by allowing communities to outsource tasks to corporations (without paying them a dime.) Interested? Read on.

According to Jeff Howe, the author who coined the term, "crowdsourcing" is defined as "when a company takes a job that was once performed by employees and outsources it to the crowd." Threadless, an online t-shirt store that Howe uses as an example, harnesses a community of artists to design its shirts. The community votes on the designs, and artists whose designs receive the most votes win a cash prize. In this model, the company draws on the ideas of the crowd to create products and services on which they can profit.

Another example of crowdsourcing is Amazon's Mechanical Turk, an online marketplace for "Human Intelligence Tasks," where companies pay workers across the globe to complete minor tasks for which computers are ill-suited. (More about Mechanical Turk here.)

It's easy to see why this model would appeal to corporations. Crowdsourcing allows them to gather ideas for products and services, and even to complete mundane tasks, all at little or no cost.

Yet while companies are harnessing the crowd to increase profits, the crowd has also demostrated its ability to coordinate on its own, without a corporation to guide its work. Wikipedia is a classic example of this sort of commons-based peer production, in which people come together to create something useful without the structure of a traditional organization.

Author Clay Shirky has written a book on this subject entitled Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. In it he demonstrates how the internet increasingly allows large groups to coordinate effectively without help from organizations. (Shirky discusses the basic premise of his book in short videos here and here.)

While Wikipedia may allow users to collaborate without the guidance of a corporation, some open source projects completely invert the logic of crowdsourcing by opening up the collaborative process such that corporations actually work for the community without being paid.

Linux, the open source operating system, receives contributions of code from many talented programmers, all over the world, driven by a diverse range of motivations. Many of those contributors work for companies that depend on Linux, and thus pay their programmers to contribute to the project.

Just as corporations can outsource tasks to communities of users, so too can open-source communities outsource tasks to corporations. Both models are fairly new. My bet is that both will grow in importance in the coming years. But is one more important, or more promising, than the other? Feel free to discuss in the comments.

Fun With Social Network Theory

What better way to dive into social network theory than to apply it on our very own network: the ITEC656 class blogs.

If the nodes in this network are the blogs of the class participants, what sort of network are we dealing with? Is it ego-centric? Socio-centric? Open-system?

Well, depending on the types of connections we are interested in, it could actually be described as any of these. Ego-centric networks are connected by a single node or individual. In the case of the ITEC656 blogs, they are all connected by Prof. Melander.

We could also classify our blogs as a socio-centric, or closed system network, because we are all students in the same class. Finally, since we are publishing content alongside of every other blogger out there on the web, we could also be considered nodes in that massive and amorphous network, "the blogosphere", an open-system network.

As the class goes on and we link to and comment on one another's blogs for the class, I'd love to see a map of how that network develops. Does anyone know of any good software for this purpose?