Weighing the merits of the new Webocracy

WEIGHING THE MERITS OF THE NEW WEBOCRACY
[SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle 10/15]
The Internet has become a wildly optimistic and democratic medium, rife with community-based sites that draw millions of fans and disrupt scores of industries. Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook encourage community, friendship and sharing. News aggregators like Digg.com let readers choose the best stories of the day. Citizen journalists and bloggers pursue their own stories and disseminate them for free on the Internet, bypassing the mainstream media altogether. Dubbed Web 2.0, among other things, this new Internet has captured the attention of Wall Street and Main Street alike, witnessed by the billions spent on companies such as MySpace and by the millions of users who visit those sites religiously. Just last week, the video sharing site YouTube was snapped up by Google for $1.65 billion, sparking talk of a new bubble. How is this new environment affecting us? What is it doing to the flow of information? And the creation of art? How is it changing our culture? The Chronicle invited two of the Internet's sharpest thinkers -- Wired's Chris Anderson and Web entrepreneur Andrew Keen -- to debate these questions.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/10/15/BUG4KLP3CL1.DTL&type=tech