Doc Searls Weblog

Interesting volley between Cliff Gerrish (also @cgerrish) and myself, centered on the topic of silos vs. pipes, beginning with my post Values and Valuation, then continuing in Cliff’s The Silo & The Pipe: Doc Searls gets Venezuelan, and in the comments below that post. While I don’t wish to abandon the silo metaphor (or any metaphor that works — a wondrous irony of all metaphors is that they are literally wrong yet meaningfully helpful, even necessary), I like the way Cliff connects the (literal and metaphorical) pipes of Unix command lines with pipes of data plumbing between Web services (such as those offered by Twitter). Much good stuff to chew on there.