OH NO! Tom Freedman just invented the Sharing Economy. Be hold for 1000 pages plus book and endless pontifications on virtues of "What I call the Sharing Economy" on the Charlie Rose and other shows.
This year's Le Web London was enjoyed the theme "The Sharing Economy". We showcased something like 15+ startups that are innovating in this space -- and even then we never claimed it was a brand new idea we had created, more it was an emerging trend Le Web Founder Loic Le Meur really tapped into during last year's Burning Man.
Point is in support of parent comment here - this isn't brand new thinking and so anyone writing it as such is bandwagon jumping.
The backlash exists because most of his writings consist of regurgitated ideas plucked from elsewhere that he attempts to pass off as his own as though he's some sort revolutionary thinker in the modern era. Then he sells tickets to his Friedman Forum for $1K a pop to people who aren't read-well enough to realize as much.
So your issue with Friedman is that he's aggregating, popularizing, and improving the accessibility of new ideas that he himself didn't create?
Sounds like any number of journalists/writers to me.
Do you really feel that he has an attribution issue? He seems to always put the focus on people at the forefront of the change he describes (for example, in this article the focus is on Chesky.) It's not like his articles are some TED like exercise, where he portrays himself as being at the center of making all of these new things happen.
Friedman is a skilled writer, but most of the backlash is from him taking well established ideas and presenting them as if he discovered them. For instance, his books "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" and "The World is Flat" are basically just standard treatises on globalization, but reading them you'd think Friedman has done years of painstaking research to uncover this new, previously unheard of trend.
Not all Friedman books are like that. "From Beirut to Jerusalem" was excellent and should be mandatory reading for anyone who wants to get a better grasp of the conflicts in the middle east.
