Musings on User-Generated Content

An excerpt from Newsweek
Revenge of the Experts (link)

The timing could be right for a new era in Silicon Valley, a Web 3.0.

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."