No one is ever going to put down Cluetrain for a lack of hipness. Name-dropping Rahsaan Roland Kirk would be great enough on its enough, nevermind that that the allegory rings true.
Like jazz, the Cluetrain is always looking forward, always experimental, but those who would seek to follow it constantly find themselves being tempted back into the old patterns, trends and formalisms of what came before. It’s more comfortable for a profit-based business to stay trapped in the mores of undemocratic, hierarchal and vaguely militaristic command structures rather than to take a chance on riding a wave (of decentralization) that without their proper adaptation could destroy them or even worse; render them totally irrelevant.
The question now: How does this model apply to the world of Journalism?
