Web 2.0 heresy - why are we seeing a public virtual stoning?

Good heavens - a journo from Newsweek gets up and says that a lot of the new web is full of cr*p, and that actually some people are rather more keen on services that sort the wheat from the chaff than a while ago....and for this he is publically virtually stoned - the vituperation in some of the articles is quite severe (just read some of the posts from Techmeme earlier today).

For the record - I am no great fan of Andrew Keen's work, have no dealings with Newsweek (never buy it even) and I'm not here to praise the Newseek report - but I'm not here to bury it either - what I don't understand is why some in the New Media community are so sensitive to criticism or counter argument that the level of venom is so high here.

When Newsweek notes that:

"People are beginning to recognize that the world is too dangerous a place for faulty information," says Charlotte Beal, a consumer strategist for the Minneapolis-based research firm Iconoculture. Beal adds that choice fatigue and fear of bad advice are creating a "perfect storm of demand for expert information."

It's merely quoting market researchers who are picking up the shift in the trends here - its not as if this is unfounded either - the whole move towards more focussed search is a part of this. You could argue that "perfect storm" is somewhat hyped, but hype is hardly unknown in this field the other way either

And heck there are enoigh calls on Twitter right now for ways to edit out all the SXSW babble that its clear that even the "Chatterati 2.0" are not averse to a bit of filtering and expertise

Later Newsweek notes that:

Fueling all this podium worship is the potential for premium audiences—and advertising revenue. "The more trusted an environment, the more you can charge for it," says Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis, a former AOL executive who was previously involved with several Web start-ups. It's also easier to woo advertisers with the promise of controlled content than with hit-and-miss blog blather. "Nobody wants to advertise next to crap," says Andrew Keen, author of "The Cult of the Amateur," a jeremiad against the ills of the unregulated Web.

This paragraph has also drawn quite a lot of ire, but I'm scratching my head as to why - Calacanis is no fool, (yes its self serving, but Mahalo is built on a reading of this same change in the winds), its one of the things imho Keen probably called right. There is far, far more site inventory than there are Ads to be spread round, so prices are rock bottom on cr*p stuff, and advertisers are increasingly leaving it to lowest transaction cost Adsense etc, and the returns there are pretty poor too.

The last paragraph, the summation, also seems pretty reasonable to me:

Those with a more tempered opinion say the expert cometh, but only modestly. "I think it's a shift in degree, rather than in kind," says Glenn Reynolds, whose book "An Army of Davids" defends the staying power of the little guy. For curated Internet fare to flourish it also needs to overcome a national distrust of experts that is, in fact, older than the country itself. In 1642, the Puritan John Cotton warned that "the more learned and witty you bee, the more fit for Satan you bee," while in the 19th century, Andrew Jackson and his followers ridiculed learned culture as an affront to the common man. In more recent years the ideal of the noble amateur has been bent to include a general disdain for the professional writer, editor or journalist. But while the tide of investment seems to be shifting somewhat, the nature of the Internet suggests that Web 2.0 populism will never be thrown out entirely. "There's always a Big New Thing, but the old Big New Thing doesn't really go away," says Reynolds. "It becomes just another layer—like we're building an onion from the inside out."

So what am I missing - he's basically saying the pendulum is swinging away from pure mass UGC, that advertisers are by and large avoiding cr*p content, and that it's not an end to UGC, just that the zenith of that movement is possibly over and other stuff will be layered over it.

And for this he gets hung out to dry - but why? What is so threatening about all this. Its not even particularly new stuff?

I must be missing something here......to me its as clear that the "New Media" market won't be homogenous, that it will fragment (is doing so in fact), and a part of that market will value quakity, edited content.

Update - nope, I'm not missing anything, the discussion on Slashdot is pretty rational in fact (but then, it has a certain level of expertise ). I loved this comment:

OK, I'll bite.

Although experts may disagree, and there is the occasional fraud or corperate shill in the science community, at least they are more likely to use the scientific method and choose facts over opinions.

Imho, while user-generated content may, in some cases, be more accurate or up-to-date, it is all to easy to encounter this situation.

Scientist: The Earth is round.
DragonBallZFan: It looks flat to me.
AnnCoulter: The Earth is flat, you godless, anti-American, terrorist-supporting liberals! And you know why? Science said it's not flat, and science is always wrong because it conflicts with the Bible!
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