It's not difficult to guess that Mr. Keen is speaking about Web 2.0. Indeed, the Web has changed rapidly. The pace of change has been higher than anyone could anticipate. Inherently a change can be to the better or to the worse. More often, every change brings good and bad. The web is not an exception.

Illegal downloads have destroyed the music business. TV and radio broadcasting companies suffer as well. Examples? There are many. Take the latest hit from FOX, Prison Break. Anyone could download and watch illegal recording. So, this is definitely a bad thing about Web 2.0. But illegal distribution of content (software, music, videos, etc) had been around long before Web 2.0's arrival. The most important change that Web 2.0 has brought is about content creation and distribution. Personal websites changed into blogs, user-edited reference websites (i.e. Wikipedia) are more popular than professional reference websites, news sections in websites are replaced with RSS feeds and so on.

Wikipedia is the 17th most visited website on the Web. Britannica.com is ranked 5,128. Wikipedia boasts 1.8 Million articles and is absolutely free. Britannica is a subscription based service, but has 100 Nobel prize-winning contributors and more than 4,000 experts. The problem with Britannica (and generally with other subscription based but professional quality reference services) is that it can never come close to Wikipedia in number of articles.

Have you ever noticed that from 10 searches in Google, the first page of roughly 7 queries contain a reference to Wikipedia page? That's it, the secret of Wikipedia's traffic miracle. Finding something in Wikipedia is quicker than pronouncing the word "Britannica". The concept of the "long tail" is what makes Web 2.0 going.

On another hand, when it comes to the quality and reliability, Web 2.0 has a clear disadvantage. If I had been given a dollar for every mistake that I found in Wikipedia's 1.8 million articles, I would be a millionaire. When it comes to a serious research or a need for a reliable reference, I do use Encarta Encyclopedia and never trust Wikipedia. No sensible person can trust a source that can be edited by anyone. However for tens or hundreds of quick daily lookups Wikipedia is quite ok. Wikipedia is a good source of trivia, but not an encyclopedia.

But what can be done with all this? The Web is free and it cannot and shall not be controlled. Web 2.0 is a natural evolution not an artificial. Web 2.0 sites are not gambling or porn websites and cannot be banned. After all, nobody urges us to use this or that website. It's totally up to us which websites we visit, which websites we use as a reference, which websites we trust, like or dislike.