Cluetrain at 20

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Cluetrain at 20
Doc Searls, Doc Searls Weblog, 2019/03/27
The Cluetrain Manifesto was an influential document when it came out 20 years ago. It proclaimed such things as "markets are conversations". I was one of the signatories when it was first released. There's a lot of discussion about what Cluetrain means, but my attention focused on a remark about how it spread. Searls says, "we didn’t do it by mass media methods. We did it by hacker’s methods. We wrote something we thought was good and put it out for review. Lots of people agreed that it was good and word spread from there." That's not exactly true. It was promoted by the Wall Street Journal and became a book. If you or I write Cluetrain, it sits there dead and unnoticed. But if the writer has connections with mass media, it becomes a mass phenomenon. More...