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You tell 'em, sister: In her New York Times column today, Denise Caruso eloquently deconstructs the AOL / Time Warner nuptials, and delivers some big-time clues that just about everybody else misses. First, the fun stuff: America Online's proposed purchase of Time Warner is probably not, after all, a snapshot of the new economy vs. the old. Nor is it a slightly sordid wedding between a luscious nubile and her tottering trophy husband, shuffling to the altar on his last hormonal surges. It's more like two very wealthy old men doing comb-overs on their balding pates, trying to look hip and zippy but not quite willing to let go of the past. Like all such deals, this deal is about control -- in this case, control over as much of the system as possible for the high-speed delivery of digital entertainment. Then the main clue: ...it seems particularly poignant if not downright odd that these two companies are set to become co-owners of a property that would be considered anathema in either of their proprietary domains: the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org), the only free, resolutely anticommercial, openly available human-edited directory of sites on the World Wide Web. The benefit of hand-crafted Web directories like Open Directory and Yahoo — and the reason for their popularity — is that they virtually eliminate the hundreds of irrelevant results that most automated search engines deliver. And the Wise Caution: While makers of mega-deals are sure to find and cultivate projects like Open Directory to prove their Net citizenship, they are clearly angling to carve out the same lucrative fiefs they controlled in the good old days before the Internet turned their businesses upside down. Appetizer: Internet Apocalypso, Christopher Locke's first chapter in The Book is up at the Cluetrain Site. Meanwhile, the book has been selling extremely well in bookstores all over the U.S., and even broke into Amazon's Top 100 on Friday. From your warmly appealing nimble atavists: A glowing review of The Book, by Kirkus Reviews, is also now up at the Cluetrain site. Sample: A different brand of business book, thank goodness: saucy, heartfelt, and warmly appealing in its faith in the commonwealth. Diogenes knew: The handsome and thoughtful Tom Mantrullo has weighed in with the most deep and personal Cluetrain review so far. A sample: Books like this occasionally come along after periods of protracted bureaucratic expansion, with its retinue of forced mannerisms, mincing hypocrites and pandemic artificiality. One thinks of Rousseau, writing in the language of the heart to a world that had forgotten it had one. Or of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the Lyrical Ballads, setting off a revolution in sensibility that went far beyond poetry by daring to write in the plain "language of men." Or think of Diogenes, the laughing scourge of Athens. You may recall, he's the fellow who went around with a lamp in broad daylight, looking for an honest man. — Doc Searls
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