"Intranet Apocalypso"

I steal some of my best inspirations from the Cluetrain Team. In '99 I didn't lend my voice to the sign-off. Thousands of people around the world read the 95 theses and said, "I'm in." I wasn't one of them. Not that I didn't get a clue. Or two. I did. But I didn't know these people, and my then current re-invention didn't have a clear place or purpose for bandwagon boarding. I was running bemused ahead of the great unraveling, making fun of a lot of the investors who were running up dot com valuations. That lengthy bull market ended in a frenzy of infotech wealth creation that was way too artificial for this old hippie. It's one of my regrets that I didn't sign on then. That old Cat Stevens "Peace Train" tune rolls around in my head sometimes when I think of the Clue Train (bound for glory...).

I think it's time for the second edition. Since the publication of the Cluetrain Manifesto, the world survived the flipping of the millenium digits, the bull market ended, the radical right wing revolution rode a pendulum swing of popular support, blogging tools and syndication emerged, the triples based semantic readjustment of the web begtan, Internet2 got well on its way to showing us the potential of unlimited bandwidth, DSL provisioning became so standardized and profitable that even the telcos could make money at it... globalization drove a lot of off shore outsourcing of services from the USA, and SPAM... god, has SPAM ever found a home in our hearts and minds.

Recent conversations have turned on digital identity, Open Source, GNU and the creative commons, content management, syndication, wireless, micropayments, and RFID. The hydrogen economy has peeked at us from around the corner and ATT has lassoed the stupid network and is trying to take it away from its birth parents.

Conversation killers like Microsoft, SCO, and Dave Winer's condition have emerged to suck up tens of thousands of person hours of productivity. But beneath that there has been a carnival flourishing, with marks on the midway buying iPods and eating cotton candy, while the show goes on in the main tent: some of the best writing we've ever seen emerging on the "blogs," Flash animations and new cyber forms of art and erudition... conferences at the University of Chicago and the University of California... the struggle with the forces of repression to hold keep the Electronic Frontier open, geeks subverting corporate hierarchies with a tool set that includes old standards like Perl and MySQL and emerging scripting and database tools that I haven't heard the acronyms for.

I think I need a second edition of Cluetrain... I need these people to help me focus on what's happening, what's possible, and where we might be going from here.