Get on the Cluetrain

October 15, 2006

Just finished reading the book version of the Cluetrain Manifesto. Even though the full book is available on the site for free, I never got around to reading it until I got the paper version. Can’t beat the paper for the flights where you run out of battery and it’s messy to fiddle around with a PC.

The book was really just an extended version of their 95 theses. Not too coherent writing, going over the same stuff over and over again. Perhaps the most valuable part were the real-life experiences and anecdotes.

I’m a strong believer in the whole Cluetrain and citizen media/empowerment thing. Thus I find it comfortable to work with people who have read at least the theses, if not the whole book, and subscribe to the whole notion to at least some extent, if not fully. The book was printed in December 1999, before the advent of this whole blogging and grassroots journalism/publishing thing. Yet it still is very timely today, if not even more so than before.