Cluetrain
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Remembering Judith
I got to know Judith Burton when she was still Judith Clarke and Senior VP Corporate Marketing for Novell, in 1987. Novell had just bought a company called CXI, which had been a client of Hodskins Simone & Searls, the Palo Alto advertising agency in which I was a partner. By that time HS&S had… Continue reading
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Train tracking
I just ran across some research I did in December 2008, while working on the 10th Anniversary edition of The Cluetrain Manifesto: Google Book Search results for cluetrain — 666[1] Google Book Search results for markets are conversations — 2610 Google Web Search results for cluetrain — 394,000 Results for Web searches for markets are conversations… Continue reading
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Bookmarking the past
I’ve been digging around for stuff I blogged (or wrote somewhere on the Web) way back when. After finding two items I thought might be lost, I decided to point to them here, which (if search engines still work the Old Way) might make them somewhat easier to find again later. One is Rebuilding the software… Continue reading
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Bring on The Live Web
I first heard about the “World Live Web” when my son Allen dropped the phrase casually in conversation, back in 2003. His case was simple: the Web we had then was underdeveloped and inadequate. Specifically, it was static. Yes, it changed over time, but not in a real-time way. For example, we could search in… Continue reading
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The Data Bubble II
In The Data Bubble, I told readers to mark the day: 31 July 2010. That’s when The Wall Street Journal published The Web’s Gold Mine: Your Secrets, subtitled A Journal investigation finds that one of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet is the business of spying on consumers. First in a series. That same series is now nine stories… Continue reading
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A Cluetrain talk turns 10
Ten years ago this month, I gave the opening keynote for the International Retail Conference of the Gottlieb Duttweiler Instutut, in Lucerne, Switzerland. The venue was the amazing Culture and Congress Centre, which had opened just two years earlier. Designed by the architect Jean Nouvel and esteemed for its acoustics, it was the most flattering… Continue reading
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The train goes the other way
Marketing Needs To Stop Its BS and Wake Up, the headline says. True. The bottom line: “At the end of the day, audiences have moved on and their expectations have changed. The next five years will see drastic changes in the way organizations engage with their audiences. It’s not a choice anymore. These are the… Continue reading
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The Mall Wide Web
Let’s start by asking this question: Is Google becoming the world’s biggest SEO company? That question popped into my mind after reading The Google Algorithm, an editorial in Wednesday’s New York Times. It begins, Google handles nearly two-thirds of Internet search queries worldwide. Analysts reckon that most Web sites rely on the search engine for… Continue reading
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On the Continuing End of Business as Usual
How’s this for coincidence: I’m sitting here reading Cory Doctorow‘s book Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, copyright and the Future of the Future when I pause to check Twitter for a message I’m expecting, and see a tweet pointing to Cory’s review in BoingBoing of the 10th Anniversary Edition of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Small… Continue reading
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Markets are Headlocks
Where Markets are Not Conversations is my latest post over at the ProjectVRM blog. It was inspired by the “experience” of taking a fun little personality test at SignalPatterns, followed by SP’s refusal to share the results unless I submitted to a personal data shakedown. Bottom lines: I’d rather track myself than have somebody else… Continue reading
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Beyond Social Media
Consider the possibility that “social media” is a crock. Or at least bear with that thought through Defrag, which takes place in Denver over today and Thursday, and for which the word “social” appears seventeen times in the agenda. (Perspective: “cloud” appears three times, and “leverage” twice.) What prompts the crock metaphor is this survey,… Continue reading
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What’s wrong with this assumption?
So I just went to look up Debora Spar’s Ruling the Waves, on Amazon, and was greeted by the above. Never mind that I wasn’t looking for what they said I just looked at. Consider instead the strangeness of having something with my name on it, as an author, and that I can reasonably be… Continue reading
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Cluetrainings
Had a great time mixing it up with the BlogTalkRadio folks a couple nights ago, talking Cluetrain after 10 years. Here’s the show. Big thanks to Allan Hoving for lining up and co-hosting it with Janet Fouts and Jim Love. Janet tweeted it live. Afterwards Jim put up a very interesting follow-up post, in the… Continue reading
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On value and valuation
Over in Fast Company, Tim Beyers nicely threads quotable pearls from Cluetrain‘s four authors, including yours truly, in Twitter’s Investors Missed the Cluetrain – Here’s Why. The context of the story is continued investment in Twitter at a reported $1 billion valuation of the company. (Fast indeed.) Now that the piece is up, I thought… Continue reading
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Thinking past the I-I boundary
For the form of life we call business, we are at a boundary between eras. For biological forms of life, the most recent of these is the K-T boundary between the Mesozoic and the Cenozoic Eras. The Mezozoic Era ended when Earth was struck by an object that left a crater 110 miles wide and… Continue reading
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Reality 1.995.12
In the mid-1990s, when I couldn’t find anybody to publish my essays (I didn’t want to cover what I still call “vendor sports”, which eliminated most of the tech magazine market ), I followed Dave Winer‘s footsteps and published my own on the Web. One was The Web and the New Reality, written in raw… Continue reading
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Quotetrain #1
… customers are so empowered that they don’t feel especially empowered. The new normal is that we expect businesses to listen to us. The companies that don’t are now perceived as Dinosaurs. — David Weinberger, from the new Introduction to 10th Anniversary edition of The Cluetrain Manifesto. That’s from the first of eight new chapters.… Continue reading