I read one of the articles the person wrote and then researched the matter. I was not impressed.

Some of the Britannica stuff was good, some very good, some not very good at all. Wikki is about the same.

If you get on topics where folks are not having Wikki Wars the coverage is pretty good. People add stuff.

Web 2.0, if it were to exist at all, would not be likely to be universally good, any more than blogs are universally engines for truth, justice, and baseball. Those of us who haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid, and who don’t have a stake in selling Kool-Aid to children, can see that.

The rest of you ought to wise-up a bit.

The curmudgeons see through. They never go for “kumbiyah crap,” but they think a lot of people do. They are more realistic than everyone else; and they seek to remind us how the fundamental things apply. They think “there is no panacea!” is an insight, when it’s really just a cliche. The unstated philosophy of every curmudgeon is: nothing new under the sun– despite appearances! (”We were the same as ever.”)

Personally, I think curmudgeons are hilarious; the most pretentious people around. John Tierney of the New York Times, a curmudgeon who styles himself a “contrarian,” doesn’t realize how funny that is for a columnist: to be contrarian is not a philosophy– it’s a pose that can be as tiresome as any other pose! “What do you believe, Sir?” “Believe? I’m a contrarian.” Hilarious!

Curmudgeons believe their lot in life in truthtelling; but yours is wish fulfillment.

They wish!

I’m off on my own quest to show that literary/narrative journalism can be done by amateurs in December. And starting a microfund for amateur artisan/citizen journalism projects (same link).

“The quality isn’t professional. Desktop publishers are amateurs and clods… their stuff is unreadable. This is going to ruin a century-old profession.”

Wikipedia even has a huge article on Britannica!

Citizen journalists? Yeah, and those leaflets stablegunned to the telephone pole are giving the advertisiing world fits.

A lot of liberals are having to re-evaluate their beliefs now that their love of a free and open internet is at odds with the bureacracy killing unemployment that it creates.

People who really need high quality up to date information will subscribe to high quality content providers like WSJ online. No university level paper would dare cite Wikipedia as a source. Carr assumes people are too dumb to pay money for higher quality content which is simply ridiculous. We pay to see movies even though free content exists on TV, how is that possible in Carr’s crazy world where people will only watch Law and Order re-runs because “durr… it’s free”.

If opinions weren’t a dime a dozen, Times Select would be doing just fine. In the absence of a distribution monopoly, they’re forced to accept the market price of $0.00833.

Substitue the Internet for the sun in this argument for a summary of Carr’s arguments:

We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent diplomacy nowadays!), particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us.

Nicholas Carr paints the public as infantile, drooling, ignorant clods who don’t have a clue about quality- they only want what’s free. I think anyone who saw that Teenager panel at Web 2.0 learned that, while those kids definitely only wanted what was free, they were the very opposite of infantile, drooling, and ignorant. In fact, I think the most eye-opening part of that panel to most of the people in the room was just how smart and plugged-in those kids were.

I’ll take competition, Mr. Carr- my faith is in the public’s ability to decide where the quality is.

Painting the web in terms of a software release (Web 2.0) and writing about it as though it’s going to save humanity gives Mr. Carr reasonable grounds to raise legitimate questions about it. And in the context of Web 2.0, it’s hard not to agree with some of what he says. If you don’t go along with the Web 2.0 mantra however, then what of importance is Mr. Carr really saying? That the web is potentially “bad” to society and culture? Potentially more “bad” than “good”? I don’t think so.

Mr. Carr “will take the professionals over the amateurs” because he trusts them more, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that those who think the web is a pretty good way of voicing opinions and sharing information, must take the opposite view and “venerate the amateur and distrust the professional.” There isn’t a little room for doing both? Every professional in the world started out as an amateur. One of the great things about the web is that we can decide which amateurs to listen to while balancing what they say with what the professionals are telling us we should think.

Maybe we should have a little faith in the ability of people to choose for themselves, and in doing so, make informed choices; choices we may not always agree with. After all, it is a democracy we’re living in. Isn’t it?

That whole Britannica example is written without any understanding of the root causes of the encyclopedia’s failures as a profitable business… such as not listening to their customers.

Many of Carr’s points are good but that “free trumps quality all the time” is not one of them.

Small world, huh?

I didn’t agree with every expression and implication of either post, as I don’t agree with everything Jeff says here.

But the thread I tried to sew between the two is this: Place less faith in the labeling and hyping of any market or social trends. In the marketplace, place faith in products and services that work, that meet a need.

Some blogs, some social media, some participatory/collaborative services, do that. Some don’t. Some innovations disrupt and change a little piece of the world, often for the better. But some disrupt and just … disrupt.

I’d rather we stop worrying about amateur vs. professional, mainstream vs. bottom-up media, disruptive vs. sustaining innovation, Web 2.0 vs. whatever. Capabilities for greatness exist in any of these categories.

If amateurs, professionals, mainstream media, emerging media, disruptors or sustainers can build good products or provide good services, please and by all means, do it. And please and by all means, do it before you start trying to label or categorize it. Bubble mentality comes from hyping things that don’t exist as promised.

Towards the end of his first post he tells us:

… that my argument is that companies need to take responsibility for things like product design, customer service, and so on, and if they do things like bring more users into that process then that’s great.

Yet in his second post, after he’d thought about it some more, he says:

(Companies should validate what they want to build) with a well defined group of customers/users.

So which is it? Bring more customers into the product design etc. process or limit your focus to a “well defined group of customers/users”?

The latter is the old way of arranging things which was tidy and convenient. It’s now possible for customers to blast the world with their opinions on any company - what they produce, what they do, what level of service they offer - whether those companies are producing luxuries or commodities. He wishes it wasn’t this way. I can understand that. Doesn’t change that it is this way. It seems to me a good idea for companies to take these changing dynamics into account.

But Mr. Nolan resists the idea of letting more people into the process of building or improving a company’s product and/or service and the reason he gives for why is in the conclusion of his first post:

… just because you have communities of users it doesn’t mean that all the voices are either right or equal. Customers can be wrong and it’s up to the company to make the decision about what voices to listen to with the end game being that of increasing the value of their brand.

I agree with this, but it’s Mr. Nolan’s next sentence I don’t understand:

But having communities of users in no way relieves a company of doing the fundamental things that we expect of companies.

But no one is suggesting companies should use what people say as an excuse for shirking their responsibility for making the best quality products and service they think people want to buy. No one is suggesting any company should “let” their users design the product. This is how Mr. Nolan wants to interpret what was said, but it isn’t what was suggested.

Why is he reading it this way?

It suggests that he is afraid of the power ordinary people now have to either help build up a brand or demolish it. His advice is essentially to not bother listening and responding to what the majority of your customers are saying because it is too much work, even though it is now possible like it never was before to listen to your customers - all your customers - which has always been sound advice in business. I said ‘listen’ not ‘do everything they suggest’ which is how he would like to read it. Why?

Really? I suppose “immoral” is strong, but “amoral”? That seems quite neutral, actually.

Scrutiny of the Web 2.0 meme should be encouraged , not squelched.

zach rodgers