London Stock Exchange

Stephen and I watched the final 3 episodes of Sopranos Series 4, last night and they were as high calibre as ever. Carmella got a telephone call from Tony's Russian girl and kicked him out. Chris got out of rehab, Uncle Junior nobbled his jury and let off and Tony has decided to stop stopped seeing Dr Malfi. Can't wait to start series 5 next Wednesday.

On Thursday I went to a Publishing Industry conference at the London Stock Exchange called 'Digitise or Die!'. Turned out to be a really enjoyable and informative day. In essence it told the delegates to learn from the mistakes of the music industry, be strategic and 'follow the market not the format'.

The most interesting and provocative speech was given by Andrew Keen, who calls himself a entrepreneur and author. He was practically vitriolic about Web 2.0 and seemed very bitter that he'd not invented Google and Blogging himself.
His angle is that 2.0 is now nothing more than a feudalistic oligarchy, owned not by a democratic base of all encompassing, participating communities but by a tiny few multinational conglomerates.
Despite his cynicism he's still very much a digital evangelist. His Wikipedia entry has him calling Web 2.0 a "grand utopian movement" which "worships the creative amateur: the self-taught filmmaker, the dorm-room musician, the unpublished writer. He suggests that everyone — even the most poorly educated and inarticulate amongst us — can and should use digital media to express and realize themselves. Web 2.0 'empowers' our creativity, it 'democratizes' media, it 'levels the playing field' between experts and amateurs. The enemy of Web 2.0 is 'elitist' traditional media.

I warmed to this neo-marxist perspective and was incredibly impressed by the confidence and self-belief in his address, talking for an hour and without notes.
He's the author of a book called 'The Cult of the Amateur' and makes his living, apparently, on the conference circuit. I must check out his blog.