Is there a troll in Paddington?

The controversial trollesque figure of Andrew Keen descends upon the Frontline Club tonight. He’s best known for his book the Cult of the Amateur. The Guardian’s Emily Bell gave him a good rogering on Comment is free last month. Dave Weinberger, the inventor of RSS, isn’t too enamoured with Keen’s ideas and Tom Coates is similarly dismissive,

People like Keen are professional complainers, stirring up fights, decrying the state of the world that we find ourselves in without facing the fact that it is where we are and wishing won’t make it not so. If you don’t like the way the world is, then use the tools that exist and push them further and find a way to compensate for the problems that you think the existing technology has created. I’m afraid it’s a cliché but it’s true. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. The world we have is the world we can work with, and anyone wanting to push it back to the fifties will fail. link

I’ll be interested to hear what he has to say tonight in the room pictured above – by the way, that’s a live image of the room being gotten ready – although I doubt I’ll agree with much, or any, of what he has to say… The BBC’s Richard Sambrook will be doing his best to moderate, the club is streaming the event live (I think) and I hope to live blog bits and twitter as and when the urge is felt. But for now, I’m off over the road to Micky’s for a haddock and chips.