Photo: Taliesin 1 by Madison Guy The Frank Lloyd Wright home near Spring Green, Wisconsin. Beautiful. Thank you.

"The doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his client to plant vines." Frank Lloyd Wright

"Art is I; science is we." Claude Bernard

"If you are caught on a golf course during a storm and are afraid of lightning, hold up a 1-iron. Not even God can hit a 1-iron." Lee Trevino

The case of opened or closed? The discussion is important. Is it about lock-in or, perhaps, about lock-out? As we move beyond uniques and page views to time spent and engagement (whatever that should come to mean) the degree of "capture", the grading of open v closed becomes an issue. First some povs.

Lock-in and the web: Dave Winer...

"If you look back to all the booms, they've all had that quality of freedom for everyone to do whatever they want. It's always that way with creativity. And you know the cycle is about to end when everything is controlled, when there are few outlets for creativity. When you wake up and sit down to work and don't feel like doing anything. That's when it's time to start thinking about blowing something up." Read the entire post here. Also - Dave's earlier, day before, post on the subject matter Lock-in becomes a Web 2.0 issue.

Pete Cashmore via Mashable Netvibes Launches Facebook Widget, Challenges Lock-in...

"The tension is indicative of what’s happening with aggregators: they’re all motivated to keep you on their own platforms for as long as possible, rather than giving you absolute freedom to take your identity wherever you like. Right now, it’s hard to make money without owning the user’s identity in some way; user lock-in remains the strongest business model, even though superficially they exist to hand more control to you."

Now comes Andrew Keen via AO Against Open Culture

"In contrast, with software, successful cultural products are authored either by individuals or by hierarchical organizations. The open community, even at its most intelligent, is functionally incapable of writing great books, making classic movies, or producing hit songs. Without a single authoritative voice, culture is transformed into muddle; without a dominant author, art degenerates into consensual miscellany. There is no evidence of successful, collective art. Not a single movie, not one book, not even a popular song.

That’s my heresy. I cherish good books, movies, newspapers, and music more than I value childish pieties about our intrinsic selflessness. And I care more about professional creative artists and their economic ecosystem more than the utopian abstraction of a collectively generated culture. These are your options, too. What do you want? The New York Times and the New Yorker or the blogosphere, Amazon reviews, and crowd-authored books? It’s your choice: Web 2.0 conformity or digital heresy; new-age Silicon Valley theory or the wisdom of age-old cultural practice."

My sense is Dave Winer has the best grasp of this important issue. Dave offers us the perspective of lessons learned, he speaks to the reality, the cyclic nature of things.