I think Keen’s dichotomy is pretty bogus, e.g., pairing the NYT best seller list vs a popular blog list ignores the deeper issue that both are products of cultures / communities / systems that are extremely limited and isolated compared with the whole of human expression.

A more fair comparison might be between the Grammy Awards and who’s popular on MySpace. But, that should just highlight how much both measures, if that’s all we had to choose from, would fail to represent the majority of the world’s great music.

What’s interesting is what’s really out there, and the web helps because there’s so much out there that physical / analog space and time gets in the way sometimes.

I do feel, however, that Keen’s ideas are a natural extension of web 2.0 zealotry. I mean, web 2.0 is, in some ways, represenative of a very small culture / community / system of people on the web who sometimes assert the same dichotomy as Keen’s, albeit from the other side of the argument.

For example, when Cory Doctorow describes your book as being about “how the Web destroys categories, disciplines and hierarchies,” it basically making the exact opposite of Keen’s argument, and thereby asserting the same bogus dichotomy.