WHEN BOOKS TALK BACK

You've been up most of the night working on a book report for a school assignment. After a few hours of sleep you get up, turn on your computer, and find a message from the author of the book you reviewed, thanking you for what you wrote. What??? Is this some kind of sleep-deprivation and caffeine induced delusion?? In the past it would have been, but not any more.

After typing my delerious thoughts about "The Cluetrain Manifesto" on my weblog last night into the wee hours, I woke this morning to find the following message in the Comments section of my blog:

"I am Chris Locke, one of the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto. David Weinberger alerted me and the other co-authors to your post, which is a wonderful essay of the state of affairs today. I don't think any of us really believed in 1999 that business would evolve across the board and fully rise to the opportunity the web offered. We did hope (in simplistic terms perhaps) to shame the Bad Guys and encourage the Good Guys -- both of which camps are still well represented out there. Your example of how individuals can and do make a difference is inspiring. Thanks for writing this."

Wow! Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. When you write a book report for school, you just don't expect to get a thank you note from the author the next morning. And Chris Locke isn't just some blogger; the Financial Times of London listed him as one of the "top 50 business thinkers in the world" in 2001. Later in the day I had a meeting with my teacher Kathy and asked her if she had forwarded my blog post to the authors. I thought perhaps they were friends of hers. She said no and explained to me about specialized search tools that authors can use to alert them anytime anyone posts anything about their work on the Internet.

By commenting on my humble little blog post, Chris Locke demonstated exactly what he and the other authors of "Cluetrain" are talking about. The world really is becoming a networked community and has the potential to become a more humanized place becaue of it. Thanks to the Internet, an author can rise up from the black and white of his text, materialize as a real human being to one of his readers and interact with the reader's thoughts about his book. Oh brave new world, indeed!