The Cluetrain Manifesto
Tagged Under : cluetrain, Internet
I recently read the Cluetrain Manifesto, and found it to be one of the most important books I’ve ever read. A quick note, I read the 10th anniversary edition with added commentary. Here is my reaction.
I found this book to be fascinating, inspiring, and important. I am a little ashamed to say that I had never heard of this book before seeing on my class book list this term, but it is extremely relevant to the work I do every day. While I was encapsulated by the first 71 pages, I was taken aback at the relevance of the rest of the book which was written 10 years ago, millennia in internet time. The biggest point that comes across from this book is that the internet is a media that people look to for un-filtered and de-corporate information, opinions, and interactions.
The book made me realize that the term “social media” as it applies in 2009 is really nothing more than an irrelevant buzzword. From the beginning, the internet as we know it was a media spawned by social people outside the boundaries, or “silos”, created major corporations or government. For this exact reason, it is important that we continue to fight for a free internet. What truly makes the internet special is its ability to allow people to share information and thoughts on their terms. It is important that the internet not be controlled in the way that we are told what it is and what it is to be used for. It never stops amazing me the huge amounts of creative ideas that are part of the “web 2.0” (I’m not a fan of this term, but it best describes my point) revolution. A point that Christopher Locke and David Weinberger bring up on page 238 is that the web has no “trajectory” or “direction”; it will become what we make it. This is still relevant ten years later, and the only way the web will become what many optimists believe it can, and for this to happen, un-filtered creativity must thrive.
In relation to social media as it is today, we see it as kind of a confirmation of the thoughts and claims of this book. Truly the Internet was created on a social basis that was a landing pad for people to express their opinions and share information on their terms. I think the “social media” movement that we have seen the past few years really is just a period in which tools were introduced that allow us to do what the Internet was intended to be in a much easier way.
Overall, social media is the future of the web and I believe the future of marketing. While I believe print, radio, and TV advertising is not going anywhere for a long time, marketers who are serious about building relationships and focusing on more than just numbers will look to social media as their primary focus for building relationships with their customers.
Note: You can still read the original text in it’s entirtey at The Cluetrain Manifesto website.
A few days ago while I was staring at Google Analytics at work I was going down the browser statistics list. A familiar name caught my eye that I hadn’t put much thought into in awhile: Opera. We’ve been hearing a lot about browser wars recently, but we never really hear much about Opera. I used to use it here and there a few years ago, but it wasn’t really all to different from any other browser I was using at the time and some new browser called Firefox was up and coming. While staring at my browser stats it dawned on me that I haven’t even taken a look to see what Opera was like or how it has changed in over two years, so I gave it a shot. Here is my review.
