David Weinberger littlepetdillo-newcluesand I posted New Clues on the Cluetrain site this morning. It’s the first new set of clues there in almost sixteen years. (The original went up in Spring of 1999.)

The urgency behind New Clues is the retreat of businesses, networks and people into the kinds of silos and walled gardens that the Internet was built to transcend.

That transcendence will aways be there; but as more and more of what we do on the Net happens inside GAFTA (Goolge, Apple, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon) and other boxes, the less we create stuff in the wide open spaces, where it can work for anybody and everybody.

VRM is by nature distributed, not centralized. Like humanity. Like the Net. If VRM happens only inside silos, it will at best be a denatured subset of what it could and should have been. And that applies to much more than VRM.

The buzzing around NewClues and Cluetrain is high ebb right now. Here’s where to watch:

I’m interested to see how well it persists. But whether it does or not may not matter all that much, because Cluetrain has already persisted for sixteen years, and will likely to continue to persist, enlarged by this new set of clues.

Some background.

When Cluetrain came out, the Web was a static place. Its main conceptual frame was real estate: sites at domains and locations that were built, browsed and visited, as if it were a library or a store. Time-to-index for search engines ranged from days to weeks. Now the Web is a live place. Real-time. Everything in it has the locational persistence of molecules in a fog. And in most cases the same life expectancy. (BTW, my son Allen brought up this distinction in a prophesy he uttered back in 2003.)

Some of the stuff we talked about back in the Static Web days is gone.  (Online malls, anyone?) But Cluetrain did more than survive. It proved to have real value to a lot of people. (Just look at the posts at those links above.) If the tweeted molecules now buzzing around New Clues accrete to Cluetrain, they have a good chance of adding to the value that’s already there. And if they do, I’m sure that will be good for #VRM as well.