Thursday, January 8, 2015; 11:22:16 AM Eastern
A Cluetrain listicle
- The first Monday in the new year, I went for a walk and lunch with Doc Searls here in New York. It's always great to see him. Our conversations are at a level I don't get to with anyone else.
- #### An anthem
- We talked about a project he was working on with David Weinberger, sort of a reprise to the 1999 classic Cluetrain Manifesto, one of the major anthems of the early blogosphere.
- Doc told me that the new project was a set of 121 ideas expressed in a phrase or a sentence, one after the other, numbered. I immediately saw how it fit into a project I have in process, called listicle.io. Lists are great! Why should linkbaiters have all the fun. What about you and me?
- Then it hit me square between the eyes, what Doc and Dr Dave had is a listicle.
- #### They had a listicle
- I love moon mission projects, esp with smart creative people like these two. A moon mission is has a very specific goal, that you head toward like a crazy fool, and don't notice when you invent new technology along the way, until after it's done. Much of the good work I've done was in that mode.
- So I set to work to create the listicle for their new rules.
- http://listicle.io/cluetrain/
- I think it speaks for itself! :-)
- #### The data is open
- It's just a static browser-based JavaScript app. No server.
- It runs off a simple JSON list that Doc and Dave edit, save in Dropbox, where my app then reads it when it loads the listicle.
- Here's the JSON file. If you want, you too can write a browser for this format! They've made the data available to anyone who wants to play with it. Go forth and render!
- And soon I hope to release an editor that makes it easy to create listicles from an outline.