The Cluetrain Manifesto

Lists ninety-five ideas about customer-business interactions over the Internet, and explains how businesses must adjust.

The Web has not been hyped enough. That's the startling thesis of this one-of-a-kind book that's sure to become a classic work of social commentary. Just as Marshall McLuhan forever altered our view of broadcast media, Weinberger shows that the new medium of the Web is not only altering social institutions such as business and government but, more important, is transforming bedrock concepts of our culture such as space, time, the public, and even reality itself. Weinberger introduces us to denizens of this new world, among them Zannah, whose online diary turns self-revelation into play; Tim Bray, whose map of the Web reveals what's at the heart of the new Web space; and Danny Yee and Claudiu Popa, part of the new breed of Web experts we trust despite their lack of qualifications. Through stories of life on the Web, an insightful take on some familiar (and some unfamiliar) Web sites, and a wicked sense of humor, Weinberger puts the Web into the social and intellectual context we need to begin assessing its true impact on our lives. The irony, according to Weinberger, is that this new technology is more in tune with our authentic selves than is the modern world. Funny, provocative, and ultimately hopeful, Small Pieces Loosely Joined makes us look at the Web -- and at life -- in a new light. From Small Pieces Loosely Joined: The Web has sent a jolt through our culture, zapping our economy, our ideas about the sharing of creative works, and possibly even institutions such as religion and government. Why? How do we explain the lightning charge of the Web? If it has fallen short of our initial hopes and fears about its transformational powers, why did it excite those hopes and fears in the first place? Why did this technology hit our culture like a bolt from Zeus? Suppose -- just suppose -- that the Web is a new world we're just beginning to inhabit . . . If the Web is changing bedrock concepts such as space, matter, time, perfection, public, knowledge, and morality -- each a chapter of this book -- no wonder we're so damn confused. That's as it should be. The Web is enabling us to rediscover what we've always known about being human: we are connected creatures in a connected world about which we care passionately . . . If this is true, then for all of the over-heated, exaggerated, manic-depressive coverage of the Web, we'd have to conclude that the Web in fact has not been hyped enough.

Maps out the implications of a customer-driven business revolution that's flipping the paradigm of supply and demand, and putting consumers in charge.

Business visionary and bestselling author David Weinberger shows how the digital revolution is radically changing the way we make sense of our lives Human beings are information omnivores: we are constantly collecting, labeling, and organizing data. But today, the shift from the physical to the digital is mixing, burning, and ripping our lives apart. In the past, everything had its one place—the physical world demanded it—but now everything has its places: multiple categories, multiple shelves. Simply put, everything is suddenly miscellaneous. In Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger charts the new principles of digital order that are remaking business, education, politics, science, and culture. In his rollicking tour of the rise of the miscellaneous, he examines why the Dewey decimal system is stretched to the breaking point, how Rand McNally decides what information not to include in a physical map (and why Google Earth is winning that battle), how Staples stores emulate online shopping to increase sales, why your children's teachers will stop having them memorize facts, and how the shift to digital music stands as the model for the future in virtually every industry. Finally, he shows how by "going miscellaneous," anyone can reap rewards from the deluge of information in modern work and life. From A to Z, Everything Is Miscellaneous will completely reshape the way you think—and what you know—about the world.

Ladies and gentlemen, please return your tray tables to the fully upright and locked position, suspend your disbelief and put on your tinfoil pyramid hats. We are now entering -- [cue lights, cue music] the Brand Dimension! Gonzo Marketing is a knuckle-whitening ride to the place where social criticism, biting satire, and serious commerce meet -- and where the outdated ideals of mass marketing and broadcast media are being left in the dust. As master of ceremonies at the wake for traditional one-size-fits-all marketing, Locke has assembled a unique guest list, from Geoffrey Chaucer to Hunter S. Thompson, to guide us through the revolution that is rocking business today, as people connect on the Web to form powerful micromarkets. These networked communities, based on candor, trust, passion, and a general disdain for anything that smacks of corporate smugness, reflect much deeper trends in our culture, which Locke illuminates with his characteristic wit. Just as gonzo journalism arose in response to "objective" news standards that claimed to foster fairness but in practice discouraged writers from speaking their minds in their own voices, so too does gonzo marketing call for a similar response to assumptions about consumer behavior that no longer relate to how people actually live their lives. Gonzo Marketing is not yet-another nostrum for hoodwinking the unwary. It's about market advocacy. It describes how "the artist formerly known as advertising" must do a 180. It's about transforming the marketing message from "we want your money" to "we share your interests." It's about tapping into, listening to, and even forming alliances with emerging on-line markets, who probably know more about your company than you do. It's a hip-hop cover of boring old best practices played backwards. The paradox is that companies that support and promote these communities can have everything they've always wanted: greater market share, customer loyalty, brand equity. Irreverent, penetrating, profoundly simple, and on-the-money, Gonzo Marketing is the raucous wake-up that no one interested in any aspect of twenty-first century business-from the trading floor right up to the boardroom-can afford to ignore.

Make. More. Future. Artificial intelligence, big data, modern science, and the internet are all revealing a fundamental truth: The world is vastly more complex and unpredictable than we've allowed ourselves to see. Now that technology is enabling us to take advantage of all the chaos it's revealing, our understanding of how things happen is changing--and with it our deepest strategies for predicting, preparing for, and managing our world. This affects everything, from how we approach our everyday lives to how we make moral decisions and how we run our businesses. Take machine learning, which makes better predictions about weather, medical diagnoses, and product performance than we do--but often does so at the expense of our understanding of how it arrived at those predictions. While this can be dangerous, accepting it is also liberating, for it enables us to harness the complexity of an immense amount of data around us. We are also turning to strategies that avoid anticipating the future altogether, such as A/B testing, Minimum Viable Products, open platforms, and user-modifiable video games. We even take for granted that a simple hashtag can organize unplanned, leaderless movements such as #MeToo. Through stories from history, business, and technology, philosopher and technologist David Weinberger finds the unifying truths lying below the surface of the tools we take for granted--and a future in which our best strategy often requires holding back from anticipating and instead creating as many possibilities as we can. The book’s imperative for business and beyond is simple: Make. More. Future. The result is a world no longer focused on limitations but optimized for possibilities.