Cluetrain-A-Day 2009: Introduction.

Hi. Since this past Thursday morning at 12:00AM, it’s been 2009. You’ve said, “it’s going to be better than 2008″. You’ve said “I’m going to resolve…”.

Screw that. Year long resolutions are too long to keep, which is why they’re so rarely kept. I’m making a resolution to make smaller resolutions this year. Want to play along?

What are you going to do for the first 95 days of 2009?

I figure the first 3 months of the year is a pretty solid commitment to anything. Lucky for me, I’m not committing to the gym, or to eat better (though I hope to do that anyway). I’m committing to working my way through the 95 theses of The Cluetrain Manifesto to riff, expound, and hopefully ask new questions about what they mean today.

What’s that? You haven’t read Cluetrain yet? Go buy yourself a copy now (disclosure: affiliate link). You’ll thank me. I promise. In fact, you should buy one for a business associate you care about as well. They’ll thank you.

This series won’t refer to the original Cluetrain so much that you MUST read it, but I can’t recommend enough that you should read it anyway.

Kudos goes to Annie Heckenberger for the original call to action here. We often talk about how much better off the PR and Marketing industries would be if, as a pre-requisite to entering the profession, they had to read Cluetrain.

What’s wild is that now that it’s 2009, that means that Cluetrain has been around for 10 years. In fact, according to Archive.org, cluetrain.com’s first version was May 8, 1999. While this may or may not be accurate, it is poetic. If I post about one thesis each week day for 95 days starting this upcoming Monday, I’ll push the final post live on May 1st15th, 2009, just one week before after Cluetrain.com’s 10th birthday. (Seems my weekly math was off).

And so it will be.

Beginning this Monday, January 5th, 2009, I’ll take on thesis #1: Markets are Conversations.

95 days is a lot of writing. I’ll be reaching out to respected friends and mentors for guest posts. If you have posts that you’re interested in guest posting for, let me know which one and we’ll discuss the editorial calendar.

At the end, I’m confident we’re going to have something very interesting. Something very exciting. And something worthy of celebrating the 10th birthday of one of the most important books I’ve ever read.

I hope you’ll join me in this experiment. You can even subscribe to just these posts or have them emailed to you.

Oh, and a HUGE thanks to the original authors for writing a book that now, a decade later, is as relevant if not more relevant than it was when it first was published. I tip my hat to the site’s creators: Rick Levine, Chris Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger. You’ve inspired a generation, but to hell with them, you’ve inspired me.

January 2, 2009 | Filed Under business, cluetrain-a-day-2009, community, consulting, creative | Tags:

Comments 

Comments

  • Alex, thanks for doing this!

    It's great to see these ideas reinterpreted, and taken up in a public conversation.

    I look forward to it.

    Best,

    David W.
  • @David Weinberger: Wow, David. It's a pleasure and an HONOR to have you reading and commenting along!
  • Cool idea, Alex! Can't wait to see what you do with some of the more interesting ones towards the end. (The ones where we were obviously up past our collective bedtimes...)

    rick
  • Rick, thrilled to have you here as well.

    To both of you, I want to thank you for essentially writing out my editorial calendar here. This is going to be a fun ride!
  • Alex, this IS dangerously awesome! Good timing too, as a 10th anniversary edition of the book will be hitting the stands sometime this year. David, Doc, Rick and I have all written additional chapters for that, but by the time it hits, you will undoubtedly have written more than all of us combined. Thanks!
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