Cluetrain
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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. And yes, all those links are on the Web. What’s not on the Web—yet—are all… Continue reading
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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 (and based it on a joke about a company that didn’t get clues delivered by… Continue reading
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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 by the same name, which came out in January, 2000. As best I can recall,… Continue reading
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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 authors, plus additional ones by JP Rangaswami, Dan Gillmor and Jake McKee. 3) David Weinberger and I posted an addendum to… 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 had a good-size list of email correspondents, and so did Rick Levine. So we put… Continue reading
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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 days of yore tended to get their cars from a single car maker, and now… Continue reading
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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 would be equally smart to bet against the mania for the tracking-based form of advertising… Continue reading
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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 put one’s digital ass on mailing list, just to get a report that should have… Continue reading
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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 also optional, because using it doesn’t require an entry in a ledger (as happens with… Continue reading
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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, newspapers, tech publications and everyday life. In our view, it’s become wholly generic, like ‘electricity… Continue reading
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At last, Cluetrain’s time has come
While The Cluetrain Manifesto is best known for its 95 theses (especially its first, “Markets are conversations”), the clue that matters most is this one, which runs above the whole list: we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it. That was… Continue reading
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Talking customer power and VRM
I’ll be on a webinar this morning talking with folks about The Intention Economy and the Rise in Customer Power. That link goes to my recent post about it on the blog of Modria, the VRM company hosting the event. It’s at 9:30am Pacific time. Read more about it and register to attend here. There… Continue reading
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What am I doing here?
I was born sixty-eight years ago today, in Jersey City‘s Christ Hospital, at around eleven in the morning. I would have been born earlier, but the hospital staff tied Mom’s legs together so I wouldn’t come out before the doctor showed up. You know Poe’s story, The Premature Burial? Mine was like that, only going the other… Continue reading
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Internet.org is a failed exercise in misdirection
[Note added 4 August 2016: Since I wrote this, Internet.org has expanded into a service called Free Basics. All the criticisms below apply to that as well. — Doc] Like the universe, the Internet is one thing. It is a World of Ends, comprised of everything it connects. By nature it is as neutral as gravity. It favors… Continue reading
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Because freedom matters
After one of my reluctant visits to Facebook yesterday, I posted this there: If I were actually the person Facebook advertised to, I would be an impotent, elderly, diabetic, hairy (or hairless) philandering cancer patient, heart attack risk, snoring victim, wannabe business person, gambling and cruise boat addict, and possible IBM Cloud customer in need… Continue reading
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Blogging the #BlizzardOf2015 in #NYC that wasn’t
The blizzard hit coastal New England, not New York City. In fact, it’s still hitting. Wish I was there, because I love snow. Here in New York City we got pffft: about eight inches in Central Park: an average winter snowstorm. No big deal. I was set up with my GoPro to time-lapse accumulations on… Continue reading
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Maybe wallets can’t be apps
Danese Cooper (@DivaDanese) asks via tweet, Wallet App (and 1-button pay) as “compelling demo” apparently works equally well 4 BitCoin as 4 PayPal. @dsearls opinion? #BitcoinSummit Sounds cool, but I don’t know which wallet app she’s talking about. There are many. In my opinion, however, they all come up short because they aren’t really wallets.… Continue reading
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On marketing’s terminal addiction to personal data fracking and bad guesswork
Quit fracking our lives to extract data that’s none of your business and that your machines misinterpret. — New Clues, #58 That’s the blunt advice David Weinberger and I give to marketers who still make it hard to talk, sixteen years after many of them started failing to get what we meant by Markets are… Continue reading