Category Archives: Cluetrain

Because We Still Have Net 1.0

That’s the flyer for the first salon in our Beyond the Web Series at the Ostrom Workshop, here at Indiana University. You can attend in person or on Zoom. Register here for that. It’s at 2 PM Eastern on Monday, September 19. … Continue reading

Posted in Cluetrain, data, Events, Ostrom Workshop, privacy, VRM | 1 Comment

Rage in Peace

The Cluetrain Manifesto had four authors but one voice, and that was Chris Locke‘s. Cluetrain, a word that didn’t exist before Chris (aka RageBoy), David Weinberger, Rick Levine and I made it up during a phone conversation in early 1999 … Continue reading

Posted in Cluetrain, Obituary | 19 Comments

Redux 002: Listen Up

This is a 1999 post on the (pre-blog) website that introduced my handful of readers to The Cluetrain Manifesto, which had just gone up on the Web, and instantly got huge without my help. It was also a dry run for a chapter in the book … Continue reading

Posted in advertising, Blogging, Cluetrain, Ideas | Leave a comment

Coming up on 21 years of Cluetrain

I posted this Cluetrain retrospective at doc.blog last year. I’m putting it here now because it’s timely again. Dig: 1) The original site and book are online in full at http://cluetrain.com and http://cluetrain.com/book 2) The 10th anniversary edition has new chapters by the four original … Continue reading

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Cluetrain at 20

The Cluetrain Manifesto went online for the world on March 26, 1999. “People of Earth,” it began. Nothing modest about it. Chris Locke and David Weinberger both had newsletters with real subscriber bases (a href=”http://www.rageboy.com/”>Entropy Gradient Reversals and JOHO, respectively). I … Continue reading

Posted in Cluetrain, history | 2 Comments

On renting cars

I came up with that law in the last millennium and it applied until Chevy discontinued the Cavalier in 2005. Now it should say, “You’re going to get whatever they’ve got.” The difference is that every car rental agency in … Continue reading

Posted in adtech, advertising, Blogging, Business, Cluetrain, Geography, history, infrastructure, Law, Life, marketing, publishing, Technology, VRM | Leave a comment

GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

In The Big Short, investor Michael Burry says “One hallmark of mania is the rapid rise in the incidence and complexity of fraud.” (Burry shorted the mania- and fraud-filled subprime mortgage market and made a mint in the process.) One … Continue reading

Posted in adtech, advertising, Business, Cluetrain, Customertech, Journalism, personal data, problems, publishing, Research, Technology, VRM | 74 Comments

A Qualified Fail

Power of the People is a great grabber of a headline, at least for me. But it’s a pitch for a report that requires filling out the form here on the right: You see a lot of these: invitations to … Continue reading

Posted in adtech, advertising, Business, Cluetrain, Customertech, Identity, Law, marketing, problems, Technology | 3 Comments

The cash model of “customer experience”

Here’s the handy thing about cash: it gives customers scale. It does that by working the same way for everybody, everywhere it’s accepted. It’s also anonymous by nature, meaning it carries no personal identifiers. Recording what happens with it is … Continue reading

Posted in adtech, advertising, Business, Cluetrain, marketing, problems, VRM | 5 Comments

The Internet deserves its proper noun

The NYTimes says the Mandarins of language are demoting the Internet to a common noun. It is to be just “internet” from now on. Reasons: Thomas Kent, The A.P.’s standards editor, said the change mirrored the way the word was used in dictionaries, … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Cluetrain, Future, history, Ideas, infrastructure, Internet, problems, Technology | 2 Comments