User Profile for Andrew Keen (Andrew Keen)

Bio: The San Francisco Chronicle recently wrote that “every good movement needs a contrarian. Web 2.0 has Andrew Keen.” Andrew is indeed the leading contemporary critic of citizen media. His deeply controversial Cult of the Amateur: How the Democratization of the Digital World is Assaulting Our Economy, Our Culture and Our Values (to be published June 5, 2007 by Currency Doubleday) is the first book that exposes the economic, ethical and social dangers of the Web 2.0 revolution.

Andrew hasn’t always been a contrarian. In the mid Nineties, he was a member of that generation of Silicon Valley visionaries who pioneered the Internet. He founded Audiocafe.com in 1995 and established it as one of the most highly trafficked websites of the late Nineties. As the Chief Executive of Audiocafe.com, he spoke regularly on the digital media circuit and was featured and quoted in many newspapers and magazines including Esquire, The Industry Standard, Business Week, Wired, the Wall Street Journal and The London Guardian.

Born and bred in North London’s Golders Green neighborhood, Andrew was educated at London University, where he graduated with a First Class Honors degree in Modern History. He was a British Council Fellow at the University of Sarajevo and a Berkeley-Stanford MacArthur scholar at UC Berkeley. Today, he is the host of the Internet chat show afterTV.com and regularly appears on television and radio. His writing can be found on his CultoftheAmateur blog, his ZDNet column as well as in traditional publications like the Weekly Standard, Fast Company and the San Francisco Chronicle.

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