Rating: 
Summary: ". . . fatuous . . . buffoonery . . ."
Review: Four dot.com gasbags make a couple of simple-minded observations and then pound them into the ground with sledge hammers for 190 excruciatingly tedious pages. Don't waste your time or money on this fatuous exercise in internet buffoonery.
Rating:
Summary: Tulips
Review: This book is useful only if you want to understand the delusions of true believers in the Internet mania. Otherwise, don't bother. As dated as Y2K.
Rating:
Summary: Totally worthless
Review: While I guess some may accuse me of 20/20 hindsight, this book is THE embodiment of the "the Internet is completely different" attitude that prevailed in the mid-to-late '90's. The authors' primary point - that customers will use the Internet to respond more to each other than to traditional marketing - isn't wrong per se. HOWEVER this book is written in such a pandering, breathless and smartass tone that it's practically unreadable and essentially useless.Time will not be kind to this one - it's exemplary of all that was wrong with the thinking behind the dot-com "revolution". Save your money.
Rating: 
Summary: Cluetrain to somewhere
Review: As a public relations practitioner of 17 years, I have watched the Internet blast away at PR/Marketing-101 in recent years. I have watched email, website communications, streaming video and audio and the electronic transfer of images turn my business on its ear in less time than it took to study all this stuff in college! And it took the unholy rantings of Cluetrain to put this revolution into some perspective. Sure, Cluetrain repeats itself, stumbles over some facts and is light-on when it comes to practical examples. However, it's a sea change that works! I have gone back to chatting with journalists, jumping into newsgroups and forums and generally TALKING (as advocated in this book). And guess what? It works!! Expect this book to be the forerunner of others determined to show the shortcomings of traditional PR & marketing -- and how to turn these around in the years ahead. What are you waiting for? Jump in, and enjoy the conversation instead of spinning around the block!
Rating:
Summary: I finally feel understood!!!!!
Review: This book was GREAT!!! I highly recommend this read. If you own a business or are part of a management team, it is a "how to" book for making employees happy and enabling business to thrive...even in this market. It defines exactly the cultural characteristics that will make companies successful in the future. I also have to mention that it was, at times, laugh out loud funny!!!
Rating: 
Summary: very well-written book. even after the dot.crash.
Review: I fell in love with the book when i read it first time, somewhere during the peak of dot coms. the buzz in the net about the book (and the website) is extremely positive. It hit tons and tons of positive reviews. I just reread the book again, and i think this is still very relevant even after the dot crash. So, if u r interested in the internet in the slightest, read this. I think this book does not cover much grounds, but then again this book cover the issue very well and have a deep insight about conversation-is-the-net. if u just want to read one or two internet books, do not read this one. but if u read a lot of net-books, this one is a MUST. they ( 4 people) wrote a very beautiful words, POETIC stuff that you will love (or hate?). i guess 100+ reviews already guarantee it as a good book. i love this one book!
Rating: 
Summary: A foreign country
Review: Very much a period piece now, this is separated from the present by a big glass wall. You can read it, and see how people thought things might have been, way back in 1998, a time when it looked as if 'the suits' were on the verge of being replaced by a new breed of business, and a new breed of businessperson. As one of the reviewers above says, "In a turn of events that will send shudders of terror through corporate America, most of the business-as-usual ways of thinking, acting, and talking, of the last century prove absolutely toxic to the would-be successful corporation doing business in this new medium." Except that the 'would-be successful corporations' are going to the wall at a rate of knots, and the 'business-as-usual' ways i.e. making a profit by selling stuff, turned out to be right after all. As for the 'markets as conversaions' model, does anybody actually relish going to the local used car emporium so that they can talk to the sales staff? People simply don't want to talk to Amazon.com as if it was a great friend, they just want to buy books with the minimum of fuss and effort. The future? People at home using digital television to access a handful of hand-picked shopping sites, with no access to, or desire to access, the old-fashioned internet.
Rating:
Summary: Get the abridged version
Review: I forced myself to listen to the first one-third of the 6-hour Audible version. Get the abridged version instead. This book has one good point: consumers don't like the way many companies talk -- "mission statements," fluffy advertising pitches, "your call is valuable to us" while they put you on hold for 30 minutes. In contrast, consumers respect companies that let you talk to a real person with the knowledge and power to solve your problem. The book rightly says that the Internet can help companies to do the latter, instead of the former. That's everything worth reading in this book. Feel free to mail me the $... I've saved you. :-) The authors take this one good point and repeat it endlessly. They don't give examples of how companies have implemented this good idea. They don't talk about possible pitfalls of taking this good idea too far. All they do is say how smart they are to have this one idea, and how stupid everyone else is. I suspect that the authors are consultants. Strangely, this book doesn't talk about the Internet, post 1992. The authors rave about how great the Internet was in the 1980s. Newsgroups were populated by Ph.D.s and bright college students, passionate about their fields. This is true. When I got on the 'net in 1983, the people were wonderful. I met two girlfriends online. But the Internet today is different. Better in many ways, but the chatter of most newsgroups and e-mail lists isn't worth reading. Spending time on-line with customers in my field is a waste of time. Many newsgroups started with smart people, but as stupid people (esp. stupid people with lots of time on their hands) joined and the signal/noise deteroriated, the smart people left to do more useful things, dropping the signal/noise ratio to zero. No mention of this problem in the "Cluetrain Manifesto". The "Cluetrain Manifesto" doesn't explain how to design a website to improve feedback from customers. They don't talk about (to give three examples of bad design) websites that have no way to contact the company; "contact us" forms where you have to choose from their list of what they want you to say; and websites that make it easy to join, but have no way to quit (e.g., Audible.com, AllExperts.com). I get the impression that the "Cluetrain" authors haven't been in the Internet in the last 8 years.
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Review by Thomas David Kehoe, author of "Hearts and Minds: How Our Brains Are Hardwired for Relationships"
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: Another Enthusiastic Futurist
Review: This book makes a strong case for the way the internet changes all the rules. If you're not skeptical yet, you should be. The points are mostly valid, and you need to understand what they're saying, but as with a lot of other futurists (like Negroponte), the authors tend to forget things like gravity, friction, and market share. Visit the web site; save your money.
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