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While the eyes of the world are focused on the global competition in London at the moment, it's still quite rare to hear of English start-up entrepreneurs able to successfully compete globally with the Yanks. But one London based entrepreneur who might buck this trend is Dan Wagner, the founder of the successful publishing platform M.A.I.D and the current chairman of Bright Station Ventures. Indeed, his latest ecommerce venture, mPowa, has been in the news recently because of accusations from Jack Dorsey's Square that Wagner's mPowa has been copying Square's images in their promotional material. But when I sat down with Wagner in his central London office, he not only rejected the idea that mPowa had borrowed anything from Square but he told me that American entrepreneurs are "slightly parochial" in their approach to the increasingly global Internet marketplace.

Once upon a time, we were told that markets are "conversations". But that's all changed. At least if you listen to Jeremiah Owyang, a much respected "Internet Analyst" at the Altimeter Group. As Owyang explained to me when he came into our San Francisco studio, today's Internet is now in what he calls its third "optimization" phase in which the online conversation has been replaced by hyper-targeted ads from companies like Google and Facebook. Indeed, Owyang told me, the big online battle today is between Facebook and Google over how our data will be controlled and leveraged.

Trust me, I'm lying. That's the title of a sensational new book by Ryan Holiday, a self-styled "media manipulator" who exposes the blogosphere as corrupt to its very core. In the book, Holiday - whose clients include best-selling authors like Tucker Max and Tim Ferriss - argues that all the major blogs represent a form of "entrepreneurial journalism" obsessed with driving page views. Everyone - from our own Arrington to their Arianna - plays this game, Holiday argues. It's written into the very architecture of the Internet.

Trust me, I'm lying. That's the title of a sensational new book by Ryan Holiday, a self-styled "media manipulator" who exposes the blogosphere as corrupt to its very core. In the book, Holiday - whose clients include best-selling authors like Tucker Max and Tim Ferriss - argues that all the major blogs represent a form of "entrepreneurial journalism" obsessed with driving page views. Everyone - from our own Arrington to their Arianna - plays this game, Holiday argues. It's written into the very architecture of the Internet.

A few months ago, I had Doug Edwards, Google employee #59, on the show to confess all about Google's early days. But whatever Google ex-employees can do, ex-Facebook employees can do better. So instead of employee #59, we've lined up Facebook employee #51 to reveal the most intimate truths about what it was like to work at Mark Zuckerberg's production in the very early days. Katherine Losse was not only the 51st person to join Facebook, but she's now written a memorable tell-all about her experience as Zuckeberg's personal ghostwriter in The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network, And it was thus a great honor to skype with Losse about both her new book and her Facebook experience.

If 2012 turns out to be the year when the online privacy sector really takes off, then the "private social network", EveryMe is likely to become one of the big new stories in Silicon Valley. Formed a year ago in Menlo Park out of the Y Combinator stable, EveryMe now boasts $1.5 million in start-up capital and over 500,000 users of its "circles" (heard that one before, eh?) product which is available as both Android and iPhone apps. As co-founder Vibhu Norby told me when he came into our San Francisco studio, EveryMe was originally founded as an address book company but "pivoted" to a private social network when it became obvious that the world was "waking up" to the problems of online privacy."We do not sell data to advertisers," Norby told me.You can't get any more explicit than that.

When we think Wikipedia, we think Jimmy Wales. But most of us don't know that Wikipedia actually had a co-founder - a fellow called Larry Sanger, who not only worked on the original version of Wikipedia (called Nupedia) with Wales back in 2000, but claims to have been the guy who "brought to the idea of the wiki" to the crowdsourced encyclopedia. But Sanger doesn't seem to have any pride in being the (co-)inventor of Wikipedia and, in his words, "inflicting" it on the world. Indeed, he fell out with Wales and quit the company in 2003 and ever since has become Wikipedia's most persistent and articulate critic. And today Sanger has a new critique of Wikipedia.

Big data is not only hot in the startup world but also in the university. Stanford, with its intimate access to Silicon Valley is most readily associated with the study of big data. But UC Berkeley, the other great university in the Bay Area, is hot on Stanford's heels in terms of making sense of our new data driven economy. And later this week (May 31-June 1), Berkeley is hosting a conference about big data entitled Data Edge which promises to explore many of the most interesting questions about defining, understanding and extracting value from big data.

In this very unique edition of the "Keen On" web video series series typically hosted by Andrew Keen, we had the chance to turn the tables on the self-professed antichrist of Silicon Valley. Keen was interviewed on-stage by our own Alexia Tsotsis last week at the TechCrunch Disrupt NYC conference, so I was able to snag him just after that for a conversation about his new book, "Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us."