Rating: 
Summary: Genius from charcoal
Review: Chris Locke, madman, illuminary, digital genius should strike fear and loath in the hearts of every button down marketeer operating in the online world. This wandering piece of rant will go a long way towards helping those who don't yet 'get' it, to stop wasting the time and eyeballs of those who want more than a television with a mouse.
Rating:
Summary: A must read
Review: If you read only one book this Millenium, it better not be this one. But if you have a lot of books to read, make sure this is on the list. You won't look at your customers the same way again. The things you'll learn will change you forever.And it may make you a better lover. I'm not sure yet.
Rating:
Summary: Quizzical Karmic Musings
Review: Resonating with both the sublime and feral, the book stomps and snorts like a Brahma bull headed toward that nasty bit of brutish truth that continually confounds business folks - namely that people are people and wish to be listened to, not lied to. The writing vacillates between infantile confrontation and incisive cynicism, as the voices of the authors clash and conform like those of any horsemen who wish to brave the rebellion. If this book could teach a few people to deal with what-is rather than continuing to stumbling through the dark hallway of ignorance and self-deception, all of our lives would be improved.
Rating:
Summary: It's not your father's internet anymore.
Review: This book is a combination of Steal This Book, Code, and The Prince. We can now converse with each other as we do business with other other. And that drives big corporations crazy! We are now in an one-to-one and many-to-one world. Those who controlled the one-to-many world (mass marketing, media, and education) are doomed to be left behind in the last century's dustheap. Cluetrain is a snapshot of the every-changing cluetrain web site, and fleshes out the Manifesto in an utterly readable fashion. 95 thumbs up!
Rating: 
Summary: One Great Thought Beat to Death 190 Times
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Old business paradigms are out the window! The web rules!
Review: This thought-provoking book actually was one of the catalytic influences which dynamited me out of my complacency in terms of my own existing web site. Just like Dr. Martin Luther, posting his similarly disruptive "95 theses" on t"he Power and Efficacy of Indulgences" in 1517, Mssrs. Levine, Locke, Searls, and Weinberger put a definitive stop to the notion of "business as usual" in the newly "wired" world. It kind of reminds me of a next door neighbor I used to have: he predicted that the internet would be "a fad just like CB radio." In a pig's eye!
The co-authors assert that "markets are converstaions" and that they "consist of human beings, not demographic sectors." Much like this site, with the numerous hyperlinks, connecting YOU, the user with more information, logically organized, than you would be able to construct yourself, the authors also assert that "hyperlinks subvert heirarchy." In other words, if the shortest distance between you and the knowledge that you need is a short clickable link on the world wide web, executed by the 1/10th of an inch movement of your index finger on a mouse, the "priesthood of experts" fall.
This is an "in your face" book that should be read by EVERY entrepreneur, EVERY fee-for-service practitioner of ANY profession, and EVERYONE connected with modern networks and the internet. You will never look at the world, or business, the same way afterwards. And you will recognize that "eye candy" web sites with the same old advertising messages will no longer work.
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