New year, new Cluetrain

If you’ve been reading me long enough – or had the misfortune to be trained by me – you’ll probably have heard me describe myself as a “grouchy old cluetrain advocate”. And, by “cluetrain”, I mean Cluetrain Manifesto, of course.

(I find the Cluetrain Manifesto to be a useful bozo test – if the “digital expert” or “social media guru” you’re talking to has never heard of it, there’s a fair chance they’re a bozo.)

Well, Cluetrain is back.

New Clues

Two of the original authors of the Manifesto, Doc Searls and David Weinberger, have written New Clues – some new clues for today’s internet. And some of it is just biting:

60 – Ads that sound human but come from your marketing department’s irritable bowels, stain the fabric of the Web.

61 – When personalizing something is creepy, it’s a pretty good indication that you don’t understand what it means to be a person.

It’s well worth taking the time to read in full. And I suspect I’ll be doing “Clues of the day” here for a little while…

Image by Loco Steve, and used under a Creative Commons licence