I met Mark Cuban –briefly– during the early days of Audio.net (which later became Broadcast.com). He met us at a Kansas City hotel to pitch us on the idea of letting him stream some of our sports broadcasts. We did a deal — not a very good one– but passed up a chance to purchase 10% of his fledgling company. I came away thinking he was too slick by half. But he sure had balls and a lot of confidence and now he has billions and an NBA team. And, as Doc Searls points out, Cuban is fearless. Check out what he told Kurt Hanson about the Yahoo/RIAA deal he put together before leaving Yahoo.
Tag Archives: Early Net Culture
Everybody on the Web is famous to 15 people
In an interview on Tom Peters’ website, David Weinberger, author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web and coauthor of The Cluetrain Manifesto, offers the following on Weblogs:
“If you browse randomly through these 500,000 to a million Weblogs, most of them that you come across will be uninteresting to you. But, so what? It’s not that everybody on the Web is famous for 15 minutes. It’s that everybody on the Web is famous to 15 people.”
We are immune to advertising (Cluetrain Manifesto)
“The only advertising that was ever really effective was word of mouth, which is nothing more than conversation.” Just read The Cluetrain Manifesto. Oh my. I don’t know where to begin. Maybe a few more quotes.
“The memo is dead. Long live e-mail.” At our company, senior management insists on emailing company-wide memos as Word attachments. Search me.
“Suppose you removed the table from your conference room and replaced the seats with armchairs. Suppose you turned it into a living room. How much would this affect your meetings? That’s how much your meetings are about power, not communication.”
“How will we be smart in a world where it’s easier to look something up than to know it?”
The last management book I read was The Dilbert Principle. I thought it was the last I’d need. But that’s misleading. Cluetrain is not a management book. It’s… well, it’s about the Web. “Our longing for the Web is rooted in the deep resentment we feel toward being managed. However much we long for the Web is how much we hate our job.”