"Courage is a special kind of knowledge: the knowledge of how to fear what ought to be feared and how not to fear what ought not to be feared." David Ben-Gurion

"To lead the orchestra you must turn your back on the crowd." Johnny Martin

"Correction does much, but encouragement does more. Encouragement after censure is as the sun after a shower." Goethe

Required reading: Keen v Weinberger - thanks WSJ. This round - advantage Dr Dave, it was ever thus, kudos! "The mainstream media's business model does not aim at nurturing talent. It aims at moving units. It therefore does exactly what you complain the Web does: It panders to the market. If you want to see the 'democratization' of talent you fear, just look at a Top 40 chart. There are bright spots, but you seem to have confused the mainstream media's handling of artists with apprenticing in Michelangelo's studio."

Dave ends his argument..."Yes, Andrew, we are amateurs on the Web, although there's plenty of room for professionals as well. But we are not replicating the mainstream media. We're building something new. We're doing it together. Its fundamental elements are not bricks of content but the mortar of links, and links are connections of meaning and involvement. We're creating an infrastructure of meaning, miscellaneous but dripping with potential for finding and understanding what matters to us. We're building this for one another. We're doing it by and large for free, for the love of it, and for the joy of creating with others. That makes us amateurs. And that's also what makes the Web our culture's hope."

We are blessed to have Dave in this conversation. My sense is Andrew is playing agent provocateur a bit too much. He's saying things simply to get attention. His reference to self as a "wannabe Hitchens" is cause for him to offer Christopher a formal apology as he is no such thing. Again, bravos to Dave! No contest.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch: A target of Andrew's rant Boing, Boing says thanks.

Bonus: Certain to help further Andrew's case is this simple blog. The humanity.

Bonus 2: Susan Mernit Fads of the moment: Ten things we can learn from Facebook.

"8. Passive versus active still matters--but you can drive behavior. Remember those rules about people who watched TV rather than posted in online forums? It's still that case that most people are reluctant to write, slow to put themselves out there, and cautious about privacy and sharing. BUT--smart networks like FB model behavior and get that lagging 80% to do more that they ever did before, raising the bar on all network/community activity." Wonderful Susan, kudos! Thanks to Dave for the tip.

Congrats & cheers: Dave Edwards, GM of WUWM, Milwaukee named chair of the Radio Research Consortium. Laurel Touby sells Mediabistro.com for $23 mil. Peter Moore leaving Microsoft, named new EA Sports prexy. Seth Goldstein and David Henderson launch SocialMedia.