Several weeks ago, as a participant at Kevin Warbach's SuperNova, http://www.supernova2007.com/, I had the interesting experience of listening to Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur and David Weinberger, a co-author of the Cluletrain Manifesto and author of Everything is Miscellaneous.

The briefest way to sum up their debate is to say that Andrew thinks the web has encouraged amateurs to express themselves and that this is a bad idea (he calls amateurs monkeys); David, on the other hand, believes that the rich experience of the web offers plenty of ways to filter out junk and be enriched by the amateurs who, enabled by the web, have something interesting and important to say.

Let me make it clear that I think Andrew Keen is arrogant and obnoxious and dead wrong. Of course, there is a place for trained professionals, but that does not say that they are somehow better than amateurs who may bring considerable skills and knowledge to their expressions.

If you'd like a taste of the debate without having to read the books themselves, you can read a debate they had in the Wall Street Journal at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118460229729267677.html. I recommend it highly.