The Cluetrain Manifesto will turn 25 in two months.
I am one of its four authors, and speak here only for myself. The others are David Weinberger, Rick Levine, and Chris Locke. David and Rick may have something to say. Chris, alas, demonstrates the first words in Chapter One of The Cluetrain Manifesto in its book form. Try not to be haunted by Chris’s ghost when you read it.
Cluetrain is a word that did not exist before we made it up in 1999. It is still tweeted almost daily on X (née Twitter), and often on BlueSky and Threads, the Twitter wannabes. And, of course, on Facebook. Searching Google Books no longer says how many results it finds, but the last time I was able to check, the number of books containing the word cluetrain was way past 10,000.
So by now cluetrain belongs in the OED, though nobody is lobbying for that. In fact, none of the authors lobbied for Cluetrain much in the first place. Chris and David wrote about it in their newsletters, and I said some stuff in Linux Journal. But that was about it. Email was the most social online medium back then, so we did our best with that. We also decided not to make Cluetrain a Thing apart from its website. That meant no t-shirts, bumper stickers, or well-meaning .orgs. We thought what it said should succeed or fail on its own.
Among other things, it succeeded in grabbing the interest of Tom Petzinger, who devoted a column in The Wall Street Journal to the manifesto.* And thus a meme was born. In short order, we were approached with a book proposal, decided a book would be a good way to expand on the website, and had it finished by the end of August. The first edition came out in January 2000—just in time to help burst the dot-com bubble. It also quickly became a bestseller, even though (or perhaps in part because) the whole book was also published for free on the Cluetrain website—and is still there.
You can’t tell from the image of the cover on the right, but that orange was as da-glo as a road cone, and the gray at the bottom was silver. You couldn’t miss seeing it on the displays and shelves of bookstores, which were still thick on the ground back then.
A quarter century after we started working on Cluetrain, I think its story has hardly begun—because most of what it foresaw, or called for, has not come true. Yet.
So I’m going to visit some of Cluetrain’s history and main points in a series of posts here. This is the first one.
*A search for that column on the WSJ.com website brings up nothing: an example of deep news‘ absence. But I do have the text, and may share it with you later.)
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