“What you may not realize is that what it free is actually costing us a fortune. The new winners--Google, YouTube, MySpace, Craigslist, and the hundreds of start-ups hungry for a piece of the Web 2.0 pie--are unlikely to fill the shoes of the industries they are helping to undermine, in terms of products produced, jobs created, revenue generated or benefits conferred. By stealing away our eyeballs, the blogs and wikis are decimating the publishing, music and news-gathering industries that create the original content those Website ‘aggregate’.

Andrew Keen, Author, The Cult of the Amateur | NY Times, 29 June 2007

Mr. Keen does not get it. Entrepreneurs, 2.0 or not, bring new satisfactions to market, disrupting incumbents and associated claims on customers. Disruptive entrepreneurs bring very low-cost or free "good enough" products or services to new buyers—customers that could not afford the incumbent product or services disrupted by a barbarian upstart.

Clearly traditional media firms will need to create or discover new ways of making money. Traditional media firms will need to find ways of integrating user-generated material into professionally published material.

However, in the process of traditional media firms transforming their business model and technical operations into a more open system, these media firms will discover that the new patterns of media consumption will transform the very meaning and production of new information.

One thing for sure, the value of information 2.0 (professional and user-generated) will not lie in the "content"; rather, the value will arrise from the communications, interactions, and collaborations among co-equal participants in the information supply chain.