typewriting

I was looking at Gullible.info, trying to figure out if all of the interesting trivia facts there are false, or just some of them, and thinking about how these are the kind of untruths that get propogated because they sound just close enough to what we know to be true that we don't question them, sort of like "markets are conversations."

And that prompted me to look at the Cluetrain.com#8482; website, where I noticed for the first time that there's a fourth author's name on the cover of the book, someone I'd never previously heard anything about. Rick Levine has a page just like the other "ringleaders", but it's not linked from the front page, unlike all the others.

Turns out Rick Levine runs hatfactory.com with his brother, and that's about the extent of his life on the web. Unlike the other three, he doesn't have a Wikipedia entry discussing his authorship of the Manifesto. An astrologer of his namesake has a higher rank in both Google and Technorati.

I wonder if there isn't more story here. At the very least it's high irony that among the authors of the "markets are conversations" Cluetrain Manifesto, the only one who actually makes a living marketing a product on the web (as opposed to telling others how to market on the web, or just marketing the web as a market), is so entirely absent from the conversation.