First, I love it. As the teacher and the taught together create the teaching, so too the conversations and interrelationships you’ve not only perceived but created across so many dimensions results in value, harmony, intelligence, evolution, and love.

Second, you say, “Another was the plain and sad fact that the tools required for the revolution were not there. Some, such as blogging, were beginning to appear.”

On this point I’m going to *gently* disagree for reasons sublimated in “First” above, but expanded upon here: without PERCEPTION – without SEEING THROUGH fog(s) of daily existence – there is NO revolution. CLUETRAIN’s inSIGHTs empowered the rEVOLUTION. They still do.

In other words, without eyes that see, how would syndication, podcasting, cloud, or any other new tools or new tools of tools be created?

To the hammer the world is a nail, my friend. Cluetrain perceived that the hand holding the hammer was not the hand of corporatacracy, but the HANDS of individuals empowering themselves not only to wield hammers, but to create new tools and tool sets altogether.

Thank you for the gift of sight. Keep shining your light.

Erik

The web has been through one bubble, is likely going through a second one, and various insights about social media, web 2.0, and so on and so forth have bubbled forth… but really, for me, the original breakthrough of Cluetrain remains absolutely, 100% true to this day.

Thank you,

-rsh

If a social networking tool becomes 100% effective, it’ll take all of our written works, our photos, our random thoughts, and put them in one easy to find place. The mindset of the past is that you’d not want to do that, because each place was dedicated to a specific task or relationship.

In the future, we’ll have ALL of our stuff online somewhere, so that we can find our own stuff, for starters. The key differentiators will be the tags and labels we apply to them, which will help decide who sees what, when, and how.

The idea that we should have separate accounts for separate concerns is inefficient at best, and silly in the long run. We all have complicated enough lives as it is. It doesn’t make sense to burden us with 50 more accounts just to match each one of the causes or concerns of the day.

We need more expressive tools, as I’ve long said, HTML doesn’t allow for the markup of hypertext, as it’s name implies. It’s like Richard Stallman being forced forever to explain about Free as in Beer vs Free as in Speech.

We don’t have the tools, but we can work together to define them and perhaps build a vocabulary which can enter the mainstream at some point in the future to get our point across.

I hope all this makes sense to you all.

–Mike–

It’s a bold step for a company to embrace social media, and many shy away out of fear of the inappropriate application of the technology as mentioned above. That social media might make their company look worse rather than better.

Zappos are pioneers here, and instead of highlighting their mistakes, we should commend them for showing us the potential pitfalls so that we might avoid them in the next attempt.

Please re-consider the Zappos twitter aggregator.

Take this twitt by Grill_Meister for example.

“Just found out my dad got laid off. He has no savings as he had to spend them on my sisters medical bills. FUCK!!!!!!!!! ”

The word “medical” is automatically linked to a page on the Zappos catalog for Medical Uniforms.

I felt abused – considering the heartbreaking twit.

“Some concepts take time to sink in, mostly because they require successful implementation, and then understanding of that success on its own terms. In the meantime, it’s explained in terms other than its own.”

I love this…