Sometimes I think advertising & marketing is so far in front of ‘us’ that we’ll never be able to catch up on what ‘they’ are doing. But a recent marketing-conference in Maastricht, http://www.marktpleindm.nl/, suggests that ‘they’ are not ahead. (Came across it through one weblog, http://ross.typepad.com/, referring to a social networking workshop for the CIA, led by a.o. David Weinberger, and checking Weinberger’s blog, http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/index.html, and finding out he’s in Maastricht at the moment). The whole conference is centered around the Cluetrain Manifesto, of 1999. Yes, that’s 7 years ago. ?!? So while the CIA is hiring ‘the big shots’ for a workshop to learn better how to use social networking tools and wiki’s, the marketeers are only now getting onto the idea that ‘markets are conversations’? Hmmm. I don’t believe it. Well, it’s a bussiness networking conference. That explains.

What strikes me more is that it takes me three clicks to go from literary theory to blogging theory, to software development, to the CIA, to marketing and back again.