Slate.com had an interesting article on this topic of Web 2.0 democracy: http://www.slate.com/id/2184487 http://www.slate.com/id/2184487 And it went in the same

Slate.com had an interesting article on this topic of Web 2.0 democracy: http://www.slate.com/id/2184487 http://www.slate.com/id/2184487 And it went in the same direction as this Newsweek article: debunking the myth that most of the users are contributing to Digg or Wikipedia, in their respective community, as implied by the Web 2.0 democracy concept. Rather, "At both Digg and Wikipedia, small groups of users have outsized authority." (Slate.com) Think about the tight moderation at Slashdot given to a selected few, or the 1% at Wikipedia. Most of Wikipedia edits are not done by 100%, not 50%, but only 1% of their users. As a result, one cannot call it a web 2.0 participative democracy. And I think that's the message from both Newsweek and Slate. Of course Newsweek "wish[es]" the experts had more eyeballs/attention, since that's their business, to be news experts. But while user-generated content is certainly not "out" (that's probably exaggerated wording to catch the eye), the point is that there is a desirable need to have those experts (or in other words a kind of elite) in order to have quality content.