This will cure your longing of the cluetrain manifisto stuffs. Beautifully written and meaningless at some point, but you goona love it i guess, you gonna crave for more, and then subscribe the newsletter.

GO buy the book, and immerse yourself. I have read some part of the book more than 3 times. Amen.

So here's my advice go buy the book, RageBoy needs the cash. If you like Tom Robbins, Hunter S Thompson, and the Gonzo style read away, you'll enjoy it. Perhaps you will find some stuff to digest, even without ingesting any substances on the Schedule I drug list.

If you didn't like Cluetrain Manifesto, Gonzo Marketing, or any Gonzo writing buy the book anyways, for the reasons stated above. Then hide the book in your bookshelf and wait until a really dark night, one in which your soul is screaming for mercy while the night rages in a Category 5 Hurricane and your only fresh reading material is a copy of Reader's Digest you have flipped through already 15 times. Your mind goes hungry, for something unanswered and unknown, and you will recall this book hiding in some dark corner of the bookshelf covered in dust and a three month old edition of Fast Company magazine. You will pull it off the shelf and find yourself drawn to the words expressed inside and the walls of illusion come crashing down inside your mind. Either that or you'll take a gun and pull a Hemmingway. Doesn't much matter to me, if you survive reading it you might even find yourself signing up for Entropy Gradient Reversals, but let me warn you the shotgun is alot quicker and painless, but it's not nearly as much fun.

"Dot.bomb," however, also examines the dotcom enterprises that succeeded, such as eBay, Priceline and our dear old Amazon. What made these ventures an exception is a major thrust of the book -- and perhaps the most informative. It also provides a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel for the reader weary of failure stories.

Since the latest examples in the edition I read were from early 2001, one hopes that a newer edition would bring the dotcom story up to date. How the Internet industry has responded to the recession, corporate scandals and 9/11 are tales that an updated version of "Dot.bomb" ought to cover.

This is an interesting companion to David Kuo's book. With a very similar title, Kuo is funnier and more dramatic, primarily because valueamerica.com was such a huge, single implosion and Kuo, by training, is a writer and, to some degree, a spin doctor. More serious and critical, Carton pulls no punches, examines a lot more companies, and has a more technical, well-grounded understanding the business models (or lack thereof) that created and destroyed the late 1990's version of the new economy. Start with "the greater fool" theory. Carton's book is better for the serious student wanting to see the big business picture.

Carton is methodical and crisp, even dry at times. The graphics of the book, including the font and page layout, could also have been more appealing or reader-friendly. If you're teaching an e-commerce course, as I have, you want to consider Dot.Bomb.

There is one great thought in this book, i.e. that the Web makes it possible for everyone to participate in the "great conversation", and that it is the summing and slicing of these conversations that will drive business in the 21st Century.

The authors are quite correct, and helpful, when they point out that in the aggregate, the combined preferences, insights, and purchasing power of all Web denizens is vastly more valuable and relevant to business decisions about production, quality, and services than any "push" marketing hype or engineering presumptions about what people might need.

Sadly, the authors' neither provide an integrated understanding of the true terrain over which the great conversation takes place, nor do they provide any substantive suggestions for how web content managers might improve our access to the knowledge and desires that are now buried within the web of babel. Their cute "tell a story" and equally cute advice to have big boxes for customer stories in the forms provided for input, simply do not cut it with me.

This book is a 5 for the one great idea, a 2 for beating the idea to death, a 3 for presentation, and a 4 overall because it was just good enough to keep me reading to the last page.

So finding the on-line Cluetrain Manifesto last year was a real pleasure. Here were these four guys with 95 wild-eyed idealistic theses for overthrowing the business world order--and setting up a new paradigm based upon (of all things) human interaction and conversation. I signed right up.

So you can imagine my delight when I found "The Cluetrain Manifesto" book had been published. I bought it in a millisecond.

Inside, you'll find the reflections of the Cluetrain's originators--in more detail, with more reflection than their Website provides. The Manifesto's background and philosophies are brought into a clearer focus--*not* crystal clear, mind you, but clearer than before. And it's a *very* enjoyable and provocative read.

It's not a flawless work. There's redundancy, for example, in the multiple essays within. Some chapters (Chapter 1 especially) are outstanding, others are so-so. One might even be called elementary. But there's always food for thought.

And don't expect to find some kind of "formula" or "strategy" or "plan" to prosper in the brave new world we live in. It's not there. In fact, such a plan, the authors remind us, would be *counter* to the Manifesto's assertion that honest human conversation is the key to success in the future.

But you will be stirred to find your voice and to add it to the voices of the revived marketplace called the Internet. Heck, you might even be inspired enough to try to help your company find *its* honest, human, authentic voice (rather than brochureware and doublespeak). And I think that's what would delight the Cluetrainers most.

This book is one of several that dramatically affected my life and career. I heartily recommend it!

As a senior manager of IT & statistical services in the public sector for over ten years I find that Locke et al make me ashamed for all the times I didn't tell suppliers that I would no longer accept their crap. I hope some of those suppliers are reading this book and taking heed because I'm sharing my copy with my colleagues and together we represent a not-too-shabby purchasing power...

I hope the message is clear; get a clue!

Like his idol Hunter S. Thompson, Locke's writing is all over the place. Uptight suits might find his prose amusing and cutting-edge, but to me it seemed like a lot of hot air. After almost 200 pages of random etymology, philosophy, and sociology in the vein of Robert Anton Wilson, but spliced with embarrassing dad humor, he finally gets to his theory, which is that companies looking to market on the web shouldn't think about marketing. Rather, they should build personal relationships with potential consumers, but still not push their products or services, since that would still be a form of marketing (one-on-one, or personal selling). As an example, he suggests that Ford pay employees to stay home and build web sites based on their own personal interests, such as organic gardening. And instead of linking Ford to their site, Ford would link the gardening site and encourage people to visit these underwritten - but not sponsored - sites. The hope is that organic gardeners might somehow become interested in Ford's products.

While he makes some good points about consumers' repugnance of all forms of online advertising, and the overall ineffectiveness of mass communication on the web, his solution doesn't seem to hold much water or make any financial sense. And even if a company did use its resources to underwrite completely unrelated web sites to create these micro-communities and forums around unrelated fields, consumers would STILL be distrustful of the company. No matter how much Locke tries covering it up with his "zany" writing style, the fact remains that anti-marketing is still marketing, and in the end, his theory would, in practice, appear even more dubious and dishonest than traditional marketing.

However, Locke does succeed at selling himself, and while I didn't find his "hey-look-at-me-I'm-not-wearing-a-tie!" shtick very entertaining, his charisma (or penchant for quoting dorky classic rock songs) will definitely win him over with the balding, stuffy suit set.

Just because you recognize that something is wrong doesn't mean you know precisely what right is. We all know that the torrent of spam that we are daily assailed with is the wrong way to market on the Web (how many of you have really bought anything that was so advertised). But while Gonzo Marketing does not spell out the precise ABCs of what is developing in this New World, he does a very exemplary job of talking about it's roots and realities. I think perhaps the most important single word that is used in both Gonzo Marketing (and The Cluetrain Manifesto) is "voice". The Net and it's derivitive, the Web, are forums for the individual voice to speak quietly but to a huge audience. It is this voice, this individual human communication that matters, because while we'll all trash a spam email within milliseconds, most of us will responed to a truly individual message from another human being. This takes the market back to what is originally was before it was usurped by corporations to mean masses of blank faces, and present it as the simple aggregation of people who wish to have discourse about their daily needs and perhaps exchange a few items for a few other items. Never mind that we're not really a bartering economy anymore, the character of that ancient market place is still deeply embedded in our psyches and most of us feel comfortable on that more personal basis.

So I say that you should buy the book if you are prepared to think for yourselves and project what Locke says onto whatever micro world you live and make money in. There simply are no books that can tell you extactly how to do it, although many claim to, but this book reminds you of lots of truths that you may have let slip into the sub-conscious realm, and once you have brought them back into view it is quite possible that you can apply Gonzo principles to whatever it is that you do with your life.

Just because you recognize that something is wrong doesn't mean you know precisely what right is. We all know that the torrent of spam that we are daily assailed with is the wrong way to market on the Web (how many of you have really bought anything that was so advertised). But while Gonzo Marketing does not spell out the precise ABCs of what is developing in this New World, he does a very exemplary job of talking about it's roots and realities. I think perhaps the most important single word that is used in both Gonzo Marketing (and The Cluetrain Manifesto) is "voice". The Net and it's derivitive, the Web, are forums for the individual voice to speak quietly but to a huge audience. It is this voice, this individual human communication that matters, because while we'll all trash a spam email within milliseconds, most of us will responed to a truly individual message from another human being. This takes the market back to what is originally was before it was usurped by corporations to mean masses of blank faces, and present it as the simple aggregation of people who wish to have discourse about their daily needs and perhaps exchange a few items for a few other items. Never mind that we're not really a bartering economy anymore, the character of that ancient market place is still deeply embedded in our psyches and most of us feel comfortable on that more personal basis. Locke even points out that Amazon is participating in his view of the current Net market by the very fact that it lets it's buyers review the books they purchase and thereby pass on to others a personal account of the value of the product.

So I say that you should buy the book if you are prepared to think for yourselves and project what Locke says onto whatever micro world you live and make money in. There simply are no books that can tell you extactly how to do it, although many claim to, but this book reminds you of lots of truths that you may have let slip into the sub-conscious realm, and once you have brought them back into view it is quite possible that you can apply Gonzo principles to whatever it is that you do with your life.