I got the news this morning -- from JP's Confused of Calcutta blog -- that O'Reilly has put Esther Dyson's entire collection of Release 1.0 back issues online. Holy moly, Batman. A subscription to Release 1.0 used to cost serious money. Now you can read or download any issue for free. Amazing.

And great for me, because now I can turn you on to the issue I wrote for Esther in February 2000 when Cluetrain was still riding high and Gonzo Marketing was -- to my publisher's deep chagrin -- still unwritten. You can grab the PDF here...

Release 1.0, Feb 2000 - TECHNOLOGY MARKETING GETS A CLUE
http://downloads.oreilly.com/radar/r1/02-00.pdf

"When paradox becomes paradigm, worst practices work best." I still stand by that statement 100%. It has made me everything I am today: broke, beaten, terminally depressed and unintentionally celibate. But hey, it was a helluva ride!

A clip...

This piece is also part of a larger piece. It’s a story about stories that start conversations. A story about how conversations lay the groundwork for commerce -- and how sometimes, commerce grounds conversation.

But the story will not be linear. It will jump around. We expect this of fiction, but not of business writing, which should proceed in stately order, from one clear point to the next. However, since the arrival of the tangled higher-order logic of the Web, business has become more dependent on narrative than explication -- and the narrative is no longer straightforward and predictable. It takes odd turns. It turns you on, then turns on you. It leaves you stranded. And then, just as you thought you’d reached a dead end, the road picks up again. The plot thickens.

Welcome to the gonzo...

DISCLAIMER: I am currently working on Esther's 2008 Flight School pages (as I did for the 2007 event), and I owe JP Rangaswami about 65,000 words -- or a BIG refund!