With ninety-five theses that redefined online markets and their prospective web consumers, The Cluetrain Manifesto (Perseus Books, 2000) dropped a virtual bomb on the virtual world. David Weinberger was one of its four authors. Therein he stated, “The web is viral. It infects everything it touches and, because it is an airborne virus, it infects some things it doesn’t. The web has become the new corporate infrastructure, in the form of intranets, turning massive corporate hierarchical systems into collections of many small pieces loosely joining themselves unpredictably.” With his new book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined (Perseus Books, 2002), Weinberger expounds on this idea. With insight and authority, he claims — among other things — that the web hasn’t been hyped enough. Read more

How cliché it has become to note suburbia with disdain. But what do we do about it? The mass exodus from our urban centers since the 1950s has left our cities gutted and strangled. This flight combined with the proliferation of single-use zoning laws, lop-sided property taxes and the spread of the “big box” retailer has created what novelist Tom Robbins called “suburbs without urbs.” While traveling around Kennesaw, Georgia (a suburb of Atlanta) in late 1999 with a friend who’d just returned from four years of college, I noted how she kept pointing out rude structures and freeways, saying, “That wasn’t here, that wasn’t here, that’s new, that, too…” The five fastest growing counties in the country at the time were right around Atlanta. Everyone who’s returned to a city of any size after a hiatus as such has a similar story. Read more