Leaving the station

Well, I mentioned this yesterday, so I though I'd better post it today: my first biz book review for The Miami Herald from back in September 2000.

I'd joined the paper's creative services department in June of the previous year and was prohibited by company policy from writing for the Sun-Sentinel any longer or for New Times, which had published my first piece a month before my Herald gig began.

If my venues for freelance work were limited — and I really didn't think of blogging then — it only made sense to find a regular thing at 1 Herald Plaza. But Margaria Fitchner, the books editor at the time, said she didn't have the budget for me to write on a weekly or biweekly basis, and the music peeps weren't interested in anything regular from me despite my pitches — though I managed to get a couple of concert reviews in, anyway.

I really enjoyed reading and writing about biz books, so I pitched the executive business editor, David Satterfield, and he said that they were doing a re-think of Business Monday, the paper's weekly biz tabloid and wanted to include book reviews.

I submitted this one, he told me that "it read well," and I'm still reading and reviewing, almost eight years later.

AUTHORS REVEAL NET'S AFFECT ON WORKER-CUSTOMER ROLES
BY RICHARD PACHTER
published 9/11/00 in The Miami Herald

The Cluetrain Manifesto. Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger. Perseus Books. 190 pages.

When you're given a clue, it usually means you already know the answer. The clue helps you make the right connection.

The "cluetrain" in the title is a quote from an unidentified employee of a Fortune 500 company in free fall from its perch: "The clue train stopped there four times a day for 10 years, and they never took delivery."

If you think the value of the Internet is strictly "commerce, " the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto think you really need to get a clue.

"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, " the authors say.

Begun as an e-mail round robin among four Web-savvy marketers (for lack of a better term), The Cluetrain Manifesto evolved into a website with their 95 theses, and into a book expanding upon their ideas.

Once past its self-evident pomposity and glibness, The Cluetrain Manifesto makes some serious connections on how the Internet has subverted and undone the corporate construct in particular, and business in general. Its gist is that worker-customer roles created by the Industrial Revolution are unraveling.

E-mail, chat, news groups, official and unofficial websites democratized, if not "anarchized, "the old model. Traditional marketing tools — and the concept of marketing, for that matter — have been superseded by the one-on-one communication (or the illusion thereof) engendered by the Net.

Public relations, advertising, organizational charts and anything else that blocks, controls or distorts direct communication between company and customers (or, as the authors call them, "human beings") are now obsolete, or soon will be. Businesses that fail to adapt to this new reality are doomed.

Much of this may be painfully obvious, but there's still a fair amount of compelling stuff here. The authors' self-deprecating style underscores the issue at hand: the restoration of humanity to commercial relationships.

Where does the clue train lead? To the reinstatement of older business models; the bazaar for example, where buyers and sellers can question, haggle and relate — now on a virtual and global basis. It's like coming home, they say, which is the logical destination of the journey we've embarked upon through the Internet.

Miscellaneous?

The first biz book I reviewed for The Herald was The Cluetrain Manifesto, which I'll have to post here soon. It was a joint effort by several writers, including David Weinberger. I liked this follow-up, too.

Internet chaos brings choices, opportunities
In 'Everything is Miscellaneous,' David Weinberger shows how the old order is giving way to a new system of organizing and disseminating information.

BY RICHARD PACHTER
published in The Miami Herald on 6/4/07
Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. David Weinberger. Times Books. 288 pages.

If you go to a store to shop for an item, assuming that you are doing so on purpose and not just to kill time, you have already limited your search to a specific geography and the set of things that are in that building. Once you enter the store, a variety of other factors come into play that affect your choices and decisions.

Though in some cases you can also request things that are not on hand for delivery at a later date, the same limitations apply when you visit other brick-and-mortar places full of stuff, like the library, for instance. The items are organized in a rather linear fashion, to use the space efficiently and for the sake of finding and retrieving things easily.

But author, consultant and Harvard Law School Fellow David Weinberger points out that the Internet requires a redundant type of sorting that would simply be impossible in the physical world. It not only requires it, he says, but by allowing items to be ''tagged'' with a seemingly endless variety of labels — including inexact, inaccurate or misspelled ones — a larger and wider audience can find an endless array of information. This, in turn, allows the spread of knowledge, ideas and opinions (more about that later) and enables commercial opportunities that were previously impossible.

He writes: "We have entire industries and institutions built on the fact that the paper order severely limits how things can be organized. Museums, educational curricula, newspapers, the travel industry, and television schedules are all based on the assumption that in the second-order world, we need experts to go through information, ideas and knowledge and put them neatly away.

"But now we — the customers, the employees, anyone — can route around the second order. We can confront the miscellaneous directly in all its unfulfilled glory. We can do it ourselves and, more significantly, we can do it together, figuring out the arrangements that make sense for us now and the new arrangements that make sense a minute later. Not only can we find what we need faster, but traditional authorities cannot maintain themselves by insisting that we have to go to them. The miscellaneous order is not transforming only business. It is changing how we think the world itself is organized and — perhaps more important — who we think has the authority to tell us so.''

Indeed. In addition to being able to buy almost anything from anywhere, almost anyone can express an opinion or ''report'' news, though it is worth pointing out that many of the sites and blogs that purport to present journalism are actually a collection of links to content created by print and broadcast journalists on other sites. But some critics and pundits are distressed about the democratization of their heretofore-privileged domains by fans and informally trained (if at all) bloggers. In many ways, the conflict is analogous to the battle between established retailers and online merchants — and we know how that's working out.

Weinberger also presents an interesting history of the Dewey Decimal System (really!), its relevance to contemporary culture and commerce, as well as other historical and philosophical asides in this imaginative, provocative and expansive book.