Rocky Mountain Internet Users Group
Minutes of the 14 November 2006 meeting, "Cluetrain
Revisited: What a Long Strange Trip"

About 30 people attended tonight's meeting. Josh Zapin
facilitated and Jeremy Kohler recorded the minutes.

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MEETING SPONSORS

Microstaff (www.microstaff.com) provides refreshments,
Copy Diva (www.copydiva.com) provides the audio-visual
equipment, NCAR (www.ncar.ucar.edu) provides the
facility, and ONEWARE (www.oneware.com) sponsors these
minutes.

Upcoming Meetings in 2007

Jan 9, Mar 13, May 8, topics to be determined. Send
topic/speaker suggestions to Josh.

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INTRODUCTION (Josh Zapin)

The Cluetrain Manifesto appeared in 1999 as a
monumental tome in the history of the Internet. While
the rest of the world was ogling the Internet as this
amazing global communications tool and the whiz-bang
technologies behind 24x7 online shopping, streaming
videos, and peer-to-peer music sharing, Cluetrain
professed that the attraction of a digitally connected
world wasn't a global "Home Shopping Network," but
rather an intrinsic human desire to connect and
communicate.

Lobbing theses such as "Markets are conversations" and
"Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy," Cluetrain was a
wake-up call to business-as-usual. Where typical
command-and-control corporate hierarchies were
designed to keep a tight rein on information (and thus
the conversation), Cluetrain predicted that the
Internet would undermine such controls. For example,
thesis #12 said, "There are no secrets. The networked
market knows more than companies do about their own
products. And whether the news is good or bad, they
tell everyone." With bold strokes, The Cluetrain
Manifesto expressed in the strongest terms possible
that we were on the cusp of a new world of
relationships.

Today we're certainly seeing this undermining of
communication control, along with many other aspects
of "Web 2.0" that Cluetrain professed. Seven years
later, let's see what one of Cluetrain's authors has
to say about it all.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Chris Locke (clocke@...) is coauthor of The
Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual,
Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices, and
The Bombast Transcripts: Rants and Screeds of RageBoy.
His next book, Mystic Bourgeoisie, is in progress.
Chris has delivered keynote talks for Accenture,
Dersdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, First Union Bank,
Gartner Group, PeopleSoft, SAP, and Sun Microsystems.
He has worked for Fujitsu, Ricoh, Japan's "Fifth
Generation" artificial intelligence project, Carnegie
Mellon University's Robotics Institute, CMP
Publications, Mecklermedia, MCI, and IBM. His writings
have appeared in Forbes, The Industry Standard,
Information Week, Harvard Business Review, Publish,
Wired, and Release 1.0. His work has been covered in
Business Week, The Economist, Fast Company, Fortune,
The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

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LINKS
cluetrain.com
rageboy.com/blogger.html
mysticbourgeoisie.blogspot.com

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CHRIS LOCKE

Back in 1999 David Weinberger, Doc Searles, Rick
Levine and I got together and got into a trip about
hyperorg.com and a lot of philosophical stuff about
the Internet. I would say it really goes back a good
seven years before that. Some of us had clients who
were getting into the ecommerce mania, and we had lots
of ideas being exchanged and not much work to do. Then
I said, let's do something together -- at the time, we
didn't even really know how to present any of it. Then
I grabbed the HTML page for Martin Luther's 95 Thesis
and just wrote over it with theses of our own.

Thesis #1: Markets are conversations

Thesis #3: Conversations among human beings sound
human. They are conducted in a human voice.

There was lots of speculation about ecommerce coming
from a clueless press and a clueless business world --
this wonderful thing had no validation. So Cluetrain
was to put in a word here that everything people are
saying is wrong, and frankly we weren't very nice
about it.

Thesis #7: Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.

This was about the control of information and how that
was going away.

Three weeks after it went up on the web it hit the
Wall Street Journal. A reporter was told about the web
page, he looked at it, called me from a bar, and then
put a story in the paper. Just for perspective,
MySpace was released the same month and "blogging" was
coined the same year. At the time, Google had eight
employees and YouTube was still six years away.

The book hit in January 2000 even though we had no
intention to do a book. But an agent who had seen the
theses called us and talked us into it. We threw a
crappy proposal together, the agent told a bunch of
publishers to open up the Wall Street Journal, and the
book was accepted with great enthusiasm. We had a lot
of press on top of the internet buildup, which was a
good early example of what the Internet was capable
of. It was reviewed in Slashdot and the New York
Times, and hung in Amazon's top 100 the whole year. I
eventually had to pay the IRS $100k in taxes.

Today, googling "cluetrain" gets 1.74 million hits
(and "cluetrain sucks" gets zero).
At one point Jeff Bezos cited Cluetrain on Amazon's
front page regarding a debate over one-click ordering,
and eBay CEO Meg Whitman made Cluetrain required
reading for all new eBay hires. Now of course these
are people who seemed to know what was going on, and
they were into Cluetrain.

Where I Went Wrong with the Theses

Thesis #29: Elvis said it best: We can't go on
together with suspicious minds.

Thesis #74: We are immune to advertising. Just forget
it.

Thesis #95: We are waking up and linking to each
other. We are watching. But we are not waiting. (I got
that right, actually.)

I was once on a panel on internet investing, sitting
next to a guy from Yahoo. At the time I recalled that
back in 1995 I tried to buy Yahoo for MCI, and they
offered to sell it to us for a million cash. MCI
declined. But had they bought, Yahoo would have
failed.

The Inevitable Pushback

John Dvorak wrote a truly stupid, dumb article called
"Cult of the Cluetrain Manifesto." He didn't get it,
just like the other critics. He called it "lunatic
fringe dingbat thinking."

My Answer to All the Critics: Web 2.0.

Buzzword: At first I thought "Web 2.0" was BS just
Like Office 2.0 and blowhard industry people speaking
about it at conferences. But eventually I realized
there is something to this.

Unix Model Comes to the Web Bigtime: there were small
modular tools that you could use to sort, slice, dice,
redirect...and you can put them together like
tinkertoys. PERL helped standardize this. Web 2.0 is
like that with bigger tinkertoys. Lots of opensource
API's that can be wired together. Very cool and funky.

Renewed Enthusiasm: The cool and funky tools got
people's attention and energy. Today my business card
appears when you punch up my address info in Google
Maps.

Utter Silliness: Then of course people started to wrap
business plans around this stuff.

Social Networks

LinkedIn - I hate it. Its' an anal retentive way of
doing stuff, with canned text etc. Yuk.
MySpace - Funky as it is, I actually build pages on
MySpace.
Flickr - That's a different sort, used by the likes of
Esther Dyson.
Orkut - A Google spinoff that for some reason has
morphed into a Brazilian MySpace. It's a cool
bottom-up phenomena.
del.icio.us - Read David Weinberger's "Everything is
Miscellaneous" when it comes out. Open (bottom-up)
tagging loses granularity, becomes top 40ish. So you
really need a librarian.
Technorati - Weblogs are growing exponentially,
doubling in number every five months. We kind of saw
this coming in Cluetrain. But at that time, you
couldn't really explain it anyone.

When business bought into the Internet, that was what
brought it out to everyone. "The internet is TV with a
BUY button?" Everyone thought it was stupid at the
time.

Here's a question for you: What is the same about
DBase, WordPerfect, and Lotus 123 -- the "big three"
from long ago? Answer: They came empty and needed to
be filled up with text. That had to do with the coming
of the web. Once you had machines that could process
this sort of stuff, the web was inevitable. The web
also solved hardware interoperability so everyone
could talk to each other. But I digress.

Economist.com: "The life and soul of the internet
party," Oct 6th 2005. David Sifry writes about Web 2.0
and says Cluetrain turned him on to this stuff.

Firefox is another significant development since
Cluetrain. 200 million downloads of an open source
project is a spectacular example, the best one.
Thousands were contributing to it and its extensions.
This is quite amazing, nontrivial stuff here. The
bottom-up quality of people saying we're going to do
it for ourselves is still there, it hasn't gone away.

Now the bad stuff: Net Devolution

Remember Snakes on a Plane? Someone called me once to
tell me to check out this movie. It was going viral
and I got so into it I bought the book before the
movie came out. We all knew it was BS from New Line
Cinema, but it didn't matter and it was really fun.

MySpace dating ads are despicable stuff being marketed
to children. The sleazy part of the internet is worse
than the sleazy part of the real world. Images of
"beauty" is defining beauty in a very despicable way.

Rupert Murdoch owns everything, and I hate him.

YouTube, the good: it's the only TV I have and I get
see all the news and stuff.
YouTube, the bad: all these morons come out of the
woodwork and put up dumb videos of themselves.
YouTube, the ugly: just like the MySpace dating ads,
there's some imagery I'd rather not see.

Sites I Use A Lot

There's a lot of incestuousness where technology feeds
technology that facilitates talking about
technology...I'm not talking about that stuff,
although it certainly affected my career. In 1993 a
guy who wanted to start an internet business report
found out I had some writing skills and made me the
editor. This thing was electronically distributed in
Word. Then Ziff Davis and CMP Publishing wanted to
acquire us even though there was nothing there. CMP
bought us, and that's how I got into the internet.
There was craziness all around me. Michael Leeds buys
a list of links for $1 Million because he thinks he's
buying the Internet.

So rather than proselytize the Internet, I'm just a
guy who uses it and here are the sites I use a lot:

Amazon Books
Google Books
Google Scholar
worldcat.org - online computer library center, look up
any book and find out what libraries have it.
boulder.lib.co.us - with a library card number, you
can go into the catalog and use the "Prospector" to
order a book from any other library and have it mailed
to you for a buck. I can get almost anything dropped
right at my door.

Tools I Use a Lot (for Pay)

highbeam.com - good for writers who are researching
stuff.
questia.com - thousands of full-text books to search.
Good for text junkies like me. You can copy stuff
(with citation) right into your word processor.
ReadIris Pro OCR software (shhh!) - On Amazon you can
see inside books, then you find something you want
that you can't copy and paste. So...I do a screen
capture and hand off the jpeg to OCR to convert into
editable text. You can buy an OCR scanning pen too.

My Current Projects

mysticbourgeoisie.blogspot.com - this is just my rage.
"The unlikely story of how America slipped the surly
bonds of earth and came to believe in signs and
portents that would make the middle ages blush."
Enlightenment Card - marketing of credit card designs
with ommmms and such on them.
nabaztag.com - a wifi rabbit product that does funky
stuff (nabaztag is rabbit in Armenian).
krugle.com - this is serious, my main source of
income. It's a search engine for open source software,
searches for code in a variety of languages. I run
their blog.
confusedofcalcutta.com - Fossil Fools. I went to India
to talk to some developers, and met someone who was
totally mad, who would turn around custom systems for
people in two weeks. But he wanted to write a book
called Fossil Fools about clueless business people,
and so now I'm writing this book with him. This site
is his blog.

And So in Conclusion...
What did people *do* back then? There will always be
dumb shit. It's getting better all the time. The kids
are alright.

Email clocke@... for a copy of the presentation.



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Q & A

Q: Business reporting is still clueless and there's no
investigation.
A: I agree. Everyone is still full of self importance
and hot air, with not much substance. That's kind of
our baseline model, like politics. At the same time,
people are doing some nifty things, but there's a
disconnect. The VC's are funding the "new bubble."
Whatever. Take their money while we can. At the time
of Cluetrain, there really was a revolution and the
internet was a logical progression, but it was coming
from a very different place than people were saying.
By the way, you can read the whole Cluetrain book for
free on cluetrain.com.

Q: What about Chris Anderson and the power to the
bottom?
A: In 1995 at IBM I had an eZine and they told me I
couldn't speak to any journalists. Anderson did a
story in 1999 about people like me who got to the net
early and didn't make a nickel on it.

Q: My perception was that these images of female
beauty got that way in regular magazines like
Seventeen. Why is MySpace any different?
A: It's similar, but -- and maybe I'm just getting old
-- I think the ads that you are for sale is just more
overt in some way. I think it extends this stuff as
far as you can get away with. It's the blatant selling
of young human beings to each other. Now don't get
wrong: I once asked Al Gore about the Internet Decency
Act and he said Have you seen what's out there? and I
said Have you seen the bill of the rights? So I'm not
into censorship. And now there are 100 million people
on MySpace, not even mostly kids any more. But it's
still disturbing to me because of all the kids there.
So I hate it.

Q: Is this kind of advertising just an American
phenomenon?
A: Nah, it's all global now. Everyone wants to make a
buck.

Q: What do you thing about the a basic fear of the
Internet in the printed media?
A: There was always an economic conflict so it's
justified. Craigslist just about destroyed American
newspapers by killing off their classified ad revenue.
You know, I have a subscription to the New York Times
but I throw the papers away and just use my
subscription privileges to search their database, all
the way back to the 1800's. Some of these economic
problems are unsolvable.

Q: Some media outlets even refuse to give out their
website.
A: Google bought YouTube with the prime directive to
get you to leave the site as soon as possible.

Q: Tell us about Gonzo Marketing.
A: It came out right after 9/11 and I got a $250k
advance for that one. But it didn't do too well. It
has a chapter on public journalism (being more
responsive to grass roots interest) and social
marketing.

Q: And Mystic Bourgeoisie?
A: I don't know. In Fossil Fools, Google crashes and
society collapses three weeks later. For Mystic, check
out the website. It's taken me on a deep scholarly
expedition into the roots of new age, starting 100
years ago. Lots of far right leaning racist stuff,
Germany in 1900-1920, etc. interesting stuff, a lot
like the sixties.