Defrag Blog

After a few email exchanges back and forth, I’ve enlisted the services of the venerable Doc Searls for Defrag. Doc and I go way back (you know, like, all the way to 1999) - having first met at a personalization.com confernece that Chris Locke (Doc’s co-author on Cluetrain) and I had worked on. Since that first meeting, we’ve had Doc as a consistent keynoter at Digital ID World — where Doc has *always* served to ground what is normally a very enterprise-y crowd in the more *human* aspects of “identity.”

And so, it is with great anticipation that I’ve asked Doc to come to Defrag. I’ll tell you right off the bat that Doc’s going to challenge a lot of people’s assumptions around where the “implicit web” should be going. The tentative title of Doc’s riff is “Why our reach exceeds your grasp” — a line that was actually written by Chris in The Cluetrain.

Wait a second - Doc will be there, David (Weinberger) will be there, and Chris lives up the street in Boulder — its a Cluetrain reunion.

[A funny sidenote to all of this: Chris was the first Cluetrain author I ever got to know (I showed up and helped Chris move out of the house during a divorce - and then I just kinda refused to leave him alone until he gave me a job), and Chris intro'd me to a lot of great folks (like Doc and David and Steve Larsen), who, in turn, intro'd me to a lot of great other folks (esther dyson, andre durand, etc). In short, the "cluetrain" was really my "ride" into some of the great networking circles in the tech world. Later, Chris and I spent way too much time laughing, and launched one of the funniest tech-spoofs I've ever been involved with -- TDCRC -- the Titanic Deck Chair Rearrangement Corportion; the peak of which was the posting of our "corporate theme song." You can listen here, but you've been forewarned, its a karaoke rendition of Celine Dion's "My heart will go on" as sung by a bunch of really drunk russians...More on that in the hotel bar some night...]

Anyway - glad to have Doc on board….and I’m now working on adding some folks to the agenda that’ll make you sit up and say, “why am I not already registered?” Trust me, you won’t get many chances to be in a room with 200 of these types of folks.

Man, I can’t WAIT for November 5th!