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Rage within the machine Sorting through my daily pile of magazines, my eye caught the top feature on the cover of Publish: "Christopher Locke on dangerous assumptions." Those who still take delight in irony will find much to relish in a "Last Word" titled Build a better buggy whip, by RageBoy's Dr. Jeckyl persona, in a magazine called Publish. For a sample, here are the good doctor's own last words on the matter:
For some of exactly that, check out The EGR Weblog, where, among other things, Chris treats us to some of the best design sense on the Web. Especially around typography. I've said it elsewhere, but it bears saying again: nothing catalyzed Cluetrain more than that this —
— which (at least I believe) owes nearly as much to presentation as to content. I don't know about the other guys, but when Chris presented us with this, we had no choice. Cluetrain had to happen. Make that 96 Theses Business 2.0 in the U.K. has a brief and positive review of The Cluetrain Manifesto on its site. "Keeping this book as a reference manual should be the 96th point of the manifesto," it says. "Send it to all your clients before you make a pitch — as one UK New Media marketing company does — and it could be the best £18 you ever spend. " The Amazon.com U.K. page has three reviews so far, all positive. The most enthusiastic comes from "A I'm surprised by the cover design, which trades the da-glo & silver Cluetrain 'brand' colors (one non-subtle expression of which is the orange DOC, above) for some sort of bubbles-on-the-move theme. But I trust the publishers. They're there and we're not. In Basel a couple weeks ago I signed fifty of the first German hardcover editions of Das Cluetrain Manifest to roll off the presses there. The look & feel was identical to the American version. So is the Austrailian, which is identical except for the soft cover. I also just learned from the U.K. publisher that an an Internet incubator is encouraging start-ups to read both I met Kjell at the GDI conference in Lucerne, where we both spoke a couple weeks ago. It was a thrill from start to finish. I first met him at breakfast in the hotel. It's pretty hard to miss an extraordinarily slim 6'6" guy with a shaved Later I understood why he asked the question. To open his speech, he stood in silence for about ten seconds and said "Shopping and fucking." He went on to explain that this was a play about retailing (this was a retailing conference) that had been running in the U.S. (and apparently elsewhere). The speech itself was marvelous theater. Standing on a black stage, wearing nothing but black, with his nordic pallor, expressively long fingers and extremely precise enunciation, the guy looked like a stretched-out Nosferatu. And damn, he was good. One of the best questions from the audience was something like "What made you like... this?" He answered, sweetly, "Mother." By the way, Funky Business is a mother lode of perfect quotes. My favorite is by Jack Welch (p. 167, in the "Funky Inc. is heterarchical"): "hierarchy is an organization with its face toward the CEO and its ass toward the customer."
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Cluetrain
