“I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.”
- William Blake.
It started with Cluetrain in early 1999. Roughly five hundred years after Martin Luther allegedly nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the church at Wittenberg, a new polemic was posted online, at www.cluetrain.com. This correspondent stumbled upon a reference to it within a research note from Merrill Lynch’s (now discredited) internet analyst, Henry Blodget. ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto: the end of business as usual’ was the brainchild of four technologists and visionaries: blogger Christopher Locke; columnist David ‘Doc’ Searls; philosopher David Weinberger and entrepreneur Rick Levine. Its essential premise is that:
Networked markets are beginning to self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally served them. Thanks to the web, markets are becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from most business organizations.
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