Internet 101

Internet 101

According to ''The Cluetrain Manifesto'' coauthor David Weinberger, the Web has been underhyped. That's right, underhyped. In his new book, ''Small Pieces Loosely Joined,'' Weinberger offers a unified theory of the Web -- and rules for tapping into its real power.

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In the beginning (or nearly so), there was the Internet. And it was good, quite good. But it was also misunderstood -- the victim of money, hype, and its own stunning and rapid ascendance to great heights.

To clear the air and set things straight, four wise men delivered the Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999 (which soon became a book). And that was good, if unorthodox. Originally, the Manifesto was nothing more than 95 theses, etched with some impatience but also with a nudge and a wink into the ether at www.cluetrain.com. "Markets are conversations," proclaimed the first thesis. "Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors," went the second. More provocative was the sixth: "The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media."

The Manifesto was born so that, put simply, we all might get a freakin' clue. Here -- in markets, conversations, and networks -- was what was truly important about the Internet.
Then the dotcoms exploded, IPOs cratered, and the Web became tarnished. And that was bad. It was so bad that folks began to bad-mouth the Web, dismiss the Internet, and downplay the digital future.

And so it is that David Weinberger, one of the Manifesto's four original wise men, now returns. His new task: not just to explain the Web (again), but, even more important, to put right all of the misunderstandings, bad press, and ill will that have recently attached themselves to the Internet. His new message: The Web is, if anything, underhyped. The World Wide Web derives its value, Weinberger argues, from all of us who travel its pages. We are all small pieces of a grand machine, "loosely joining ourselves in ways that we're still inventing." Hence his book: Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web (Perseus Books, April 2002).
Weinberger, a former academic and public-relations executive, currently runs the strategic-marketing consulting firm Evident Marketing Inc. He also publishes JOHO: The Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization, an online 'zine that looks at how the Web affects the way that businesses work. In an interview with Fast Company, Weinberger offers a short course on the World Wide Web and its true power.

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