In my book Andrew Keen is a pompous fraud 
and I wouldn't cross the street to put him out if he were on fire, so I particularly enjoyed seeing Markos Moulitsas expose Keen's sloppy "professionalism."
Moulitsas (aka Kos) quotes Keen's book...
In some ways a milestone is just a rock. In other ways it signifies the end of one thing and the beginning of something new. A couple of milestones this week:
As more news organizations unite their online and offline efforts, there's a potential for great confusion as print journalists encounter a whole new language.
Dana Eagles of the Poynter Institute and Danny Sanchez of the Orlando Sentinel ride to the rescue with Webspeak, a series of simple definitions. First up: Page views, sock puppetry, mashup, bread crumbs. I couldn't find an RSS feed, but then, if you need the definitions you probably aren't into RSS anyway.
Facebook isn't journalism. It doesn't even try. But like other conversational/participative media, it's brimming with opportunity for journalism, for community-building, and for commerce.
Facebook came from a university setting and precisely targets a poorly met need in the general area of community and communications.
So why was Facebook created not inside a college of communications, but rather by a computer programmer who briefly attended Harvard?
Microsoft's $240 million investment in Facebook is being interpreted (by the AP, among others) as placing a $15 billion value on the whole operation.
This is silly for a number of fairly obvious reasons. Perhaps the most obvious is that Microsoft isn't trying to buy Facebook, but rather has other objectives in mind.
Anyone who has watched Microsoft for any amount of time knows the pattern: Partner, learn, copy, crush.
I'm generally a big fan of the Poynter Institute and I often quote Roy Peter Clark, but not in the case of "Your Duty to Read the Paper," in which the great writing coach transforms himself right before our eyes into an Internet troll.
He says journalists should read more newspapers because they have a duty to do so.
I say they should read less.
Toss print aside.
Get out of the office.
Start talking to real people.
Larry Magid has a warm and fuzzy piece about Linux on the desktop on nytimes.com today.
I previously wrote about how my elderly mother is now running Linux on her laptop, which was unusable under Microsoft Vista.
Alan "Newsosaur" Mutter is one of my faves, and his brain drain post was a classic even before the comments started rolling in.
But the young net natives, for the most part, rank too low in the organizations that employ them to be invited to the pivotal discussions determining the stratgeic initiatives that could help their employers sustain their franchises.
Writing for OJR.com, Robert Niles argues: “There's no need for professional reporters to fear user-generated content. Someone needs to lead the Web's content communities, and journalists make the ideal candidates.”
While I agree wholeheartedly that newspaper journalists should engage as leaders in the community conversation, I think it would be a mistake to overlook the shortcomings and handicaps we inherit from our past.
So here’s a counterpoint to Niles’ essay.
According to E&P, Bank of America analyst Joe Arns says the value of an online reader to a newspaper company is on the rise:
