Blog naysayers may be nothing more than crass opportunists

There’s always going to be opportunists out to make a buck at anything. Blogs being very popular, are now attracting hucksters wishing to get popular by dissing bloggers.

One example is Andrew Keen’s new book ‘The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture‘ which trashes bloggers and other ‘amateurs’ on the Internet. Keen’s thesis is that amateur content threatens to kill off mainsteam media reporting to the detriment of our society. Fortunately, as Beltway Blogger reports, the top professionals in the blogsophere have refused to engage Keen in a debate or been highly critical of his work.

• Dave Winer of Scripting News trashed Keen’s book as ‘beneath criticism’ after reading a draft back in February. ‘He’s trying to make a buck, and doesn’t mind being an idiot and hurting honest people to do it. … The sad part of it is that there was a good book to be written here. Lots of negative stuff about blogs that could have been explored and debated. But that’s not what this book is.
• Dan Gillmor, director of the Center for Citizen Media and the author of a book called ‘We The Media,’ called Keen’s work ‘a shabby and dishonest treatment of an important topic’ that is based not on facts but on ‘falsehoods and demagoguery.’
• Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine declined Keen and his publisher’s invitation to debate Keen’s thesis.
• Lawrence Lessig: ‘…What is puzzling about this book is that it purports to be a book attacking the sloppiness, error and ignorance of the Internet, yet it itself is shot through with sloppiness, error and ignorance. It tells us that without institutions, and standards, to signal what we can trust (like the institution (Doubleday) that decided to print his book), we won’t know what’s true and what’s false. But the book itself is riddled with falsity — from simple errors of fact, to gross misreadings of arguments, to the most basic errors of economics.’
• Instapundit Glenn Reynolds: Keen… would be better served trying to come up with ways to make the new world better, than by ranting on behalf of a world that is now history.’

Keen’s basically feeding up copy for those unfamiliar with the positive contributions of blogs and amateur reporting. Journalism professors teaching their students that blogs are generally for people with an ax to grind will love adding this book to their class reading. But rather than teaching people to be open to new ideas, to question mass media (merely entertainment at times), and to produce content, Keen’s approach is a step backwards.