“HYPERLINKS SUBVERT HIERARCHIES”

My guest today was the guy who popularised that statement, although he doesn’t take credit for coming up with it.

For my 60th G’DAY WORLD interview, I had the great pleasure this morning of chatting with David Weinberger! I was also fortunate enough to attend his presentation at BlogOn2005 last month and it was fantastic. He’s a smart, articulate, funny, self-deprecating guy, who also happens to be a “Fellow” at Harvard (I asked him to explain what the hell that actually means… apparently it doesn’t pull the chicks) and, of course, one of the co-authors of the bible, The Cluetrain Manifesto.

For those of you who STILL haven’t heard of Cluetrain, here’s a quick description from Wikipedia:

The Cluetrain Manifesto is a set of 95 theses organised and put forward as a manifesto, or call to action, for all businesses operating within what is suggested to be a newly connected marketplace. The ideas put forward within the manifesto aim to examine the impact of the Internet on both markets (consumers) and organisations. In addition, as both consumers and organisations are able to utilise the Internet and Intranets to establish a previously unavailable level of communication both within and between these two groups, the manifesto suggests that the changes that will be required from organisations as they respond to the new marketplace environment.

Long time G’DAY WORLD listeners might recall that we had Doc Searls, another of the Cluetrain authors, on the show waaaaay back in January 2005, before most of you even knew what a podcast was I bet! If you haven’t listened to that interview, you should! It makes a nice companion piece to this one. David even felt required to mention Doc’s name every 20 minutes. 🙂

Some of the things we talked about:
> The Long Tail meme
> Clay Shirky
> Doc Searls
> Christopher Locke
> JD Lasica’s book “Darknet”
> John Battelle’s book “The Search”
> Information Replaces Relationships
> Sony’s DRM problems
> Thomas Vanderwal and the concept of “folksonomy”

Finally – make sure you check out David’s last book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and keep an eye out for his next one coming out in 2007, Everything Is Miscellaneous, by subscribing to JOHO THE BLOG.