Partial map of the Internet based on 1/15/2005 data.

[Note: This post is a Rexplanation.]

In my opinion, there are two ways people understand the internet.

The first way is to understand the internet as something to use.

The second way is to think of the internet as something you not only use, but something people are and a place people live and work.

Those who use the internet understand it with metaphors related to legacy media and channels of communication or different types of utility and tools. To them, the internet is about reading, viewing, listening, looking-up, sharing, calling, sending, buying. Even those who use the internet’s tools of social media still think of it in terms of legacy metaphors: friends, following, hanging out, chatting.

Those who’ve reached the understanding that they are the internet are similar to those who have reached an understanding that any organization or institution is both a structure and a collection of people. It’s the same dynamic that enables the Supreme Court to rule that corporations are people. Special interests describe their special interest as people (I’m the NRA- well, not actually me, but those guys holding the gun are). Cities are streets and buildings, but cities are also people (after the May, 2010, flood, in my hometown we used the slogan, “We are Nashville” to declare our can-do spirit). In the New Testament, the greek word ekklesia that we translate into the word church refers to an assemblage of people who are “called together” — in other words, a church is people, like the internet is people.

So, viewing the internet as more than something to use, but as people and place is not a radical concept — indeed, it should be a rather simple concept to grasp.

Yet some very smart people just don’t seem to get it.

One of my favorite very smart people to use as a punchline for not getting it is Malcom Gladwell who plays school marm whenever he explains the internet as only a user could.

The recent SOPA/PIPA battle demonstrated the divide between those who understand the internet as people and those who perceive it as technology. Earlier this month, I wrote about visiting my congressman regarding SOPA and suggested then (before the legislation cracked under the pressure) that the internet had not yet demonstrated what could happen if it brought its power to the debate. It was clear to me that those who backed SOPA understood the internet as being “technology” used by people — and not as a place that people inhabit. That was their downfall.

A few days later, in a comment thread on Dave Winer’s blog, I wrote, “The tech blogosphere is filled with people who have broken through some barrier of comprehension one needs to experience the internet as a place, as well as a platform for all sorts of media and utility. So much of politics — at least at the traditional activist level and the way the US representative system is set up — is tied to an understanding of place in exclusively geographic terms. While traditional media and the political blogosphere is focused on what’s happening in some county in northern New Hampshire, the tech-blogosphere is wondering how lawmakers can be so clueless in understanding the ramifications of the entertainment industry’s power grab through SOPA — a global issue. I remember Tip O’Neill’s line, “All politics are local.” But for those of us who live on the internet, I’m not sure I know what local is anymore.”

Today, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote about a similar disconnect in the understanding politicians have of place, compared to how businesses view it — and I would argue, the way that people who understand the internet as a collection of people view it:

“Politicians see the world as blocs of voters living in specific geographies — and they see their job as maximizing the economic benefits for the voters in their geography. Many C.E.O.’s, though, increasingly see the world as a place where their products can be made anywhere through global supply chains (often assembled with nonunion-protected labor) and sold everywhere. These C.E.O.’s rarely talk about “outsourcing” these days. Their world is now so integrated that there is no “out” and no “in” anymore. In their businesses, every product and many services now are imagined, designed, marketed and built through global supply chains that seek to access the best quality talent at the lowest cost, wherever it exists. They see more and more of their products today as “Made in the World” not “Made in America.” Therein lies the tension. So many of “our” companies actually see themselves now as citizens of the world. But Obama is president of the United States.”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not ready declare some New World Order exists because Al Gore invented the internet because the Trilateral Commission put him up to it.

However, it seems clear to me that it is time to start seeing the internet for what it is — and that’s lots more than a platform and technology.

For a long time, as a service to the 12 readers of this blog, I’ve wanted to start using the label “Explanation” on certain types of expository RexBlog posts. That way, I can refer back to them whenever that topic recurs. So I created what WordPress calls a “category” and thought to myself, “hey, you’re a branding kind of guy,” so I changed the category name to “Rexplanation” and slapped together the accompanying graphic. This is my first officially labeled Rexplanation as I needed a post to explain what they are. By the way, I have an even better idea for organizing such contextual content (note to self: do a Rexplanation for the term “contextual content”) but it’s called “a wiki” and I’ve got too many projects happening now to tackle that one. If you’d like to see a list of Rexplanations, you can find one at the URL, http://www.rexblog.com/category/Rexplanation. (Note to people who read this when I first post it: There won’t be a list at that category link, as this is the first and only post I will have written using that category tag.)

So, excuse this interruption for some shameless self-promotion, but I’m honored (baffled a bit, yet honored) that this 11-year-old blog is included in the current issue of Chief Executive magazine, on a list their editors have selected as the Top Ten CEO Blogs. The list is a sidebar of a story titled, “Should CEOs Have Personal Blogs?” that, in turn, is part of six-issue series on CEO “personal effectiveness.”

[So, come to think of it, as this list first appeared in a print magazine, I will claim that it isn't actually a "top ten list that appeared on the internet."]

But seriously, I’m happy to appear on any list that may encourage the people who run companies, large and small, to understand how a personal blog can help them in many ways — most of which will come as a surprise, the more they view it as a part of who they are — not a task they can outsource to the PR department.*

Best part of the list: I’ve found some new blogs to follow:

Allonhill
Sue Allon, CEO; Blog: Allonhill

FirstRain
Penny Herscher, CEO; Blog: The Grassy Road: A CEO at Work and Play in Silicon Valley and Beyond

Forrester Research
George Colony, CEOCEO; Blog: The Counterintuitive CEO

Hammock, Inc.
Rex Hammock, CEO; Blog: Rex Hammock’s RexBlog

Makovsky + Company
Kenneth Makovsky, president; Blog: My Three Cents

Merisant Company
Paul Block, CEO; Blog: PaulRBlock.com

Royal Caribbean International
Adam Goldstein, President and CEO; Blog: Why Not?

Saatchi & Saatchi
Kevin Roberts, CEO; Blog: KR Connect

Thomson Reuters
Tom Glocer, CEO; Blog:Tom Glocer’s Blog

Zappos
Tony Hsieh, CEO; Blog: CEO and COO Blog

*This is a list of blogs that are written in the first person and are labeled personal blogs. Most of them are not even on the corporate URL nor, apparently, the company Content Management System (CMS), but are hosted by Blogger.com or WordPress.com. (RexBlog is running on the open-source WordPress software hosted on “virtual servers” from Amazon web services.)

The blogs on the list are labeled personal, and are not marketing or company blogs (well, in some ways they all are that, but let’s not get existential). Company blogs can be written by the legal department, for all I care. Just not blogs that purport to be personal.

I’m not opposed to having professional editors review and help out on CEO blog posts. I think, however, such posts should originate from the CEO and not the PR department. For a blog that claims to be “personal,” I believe the post should be written by the CEO him- or herself and if edited by someone else, it should be edited only for clarity and grammar/spelling.

That said (and this should be obvious), no one edits these posts appearing on my blog. Frankly, the quality of my posts would be greatly improved if I ran them by some of the editors who work at Hammock — who, no doubt, grimace at my spelling and dangling whatevers. (And they would also tell me if that should be whom instead of who.

Hammock editors make me sound too perfect. Therefore, they edit things that I write that appear in our publications or in reports to clients. But on this blog, it’s pretty-much WYSIWYG.

The other day, when I posted that venn diagram review of Moneyball, it generated lots of traffic, but it also generated an email from someone asking if I knew my blog have been hacked and tons of spam links were swarming all over it. Needless to say, I was not aware of that. And so, with a little help from some friends and a couple of the explosive experts at Hammock Labs, long-needed maintenance and moving took place.

As a temporary measure, I activated this theme, one of the default WordPress themes called Twenty Ten. With some CSS shots in the dark, I got it scaled back to what I wanted, while my real theme was being sanitized.

However, several people (estimate: between 2 and 4), said it was more readable than the previous them and, hey, I’m all about readability.

So, unless the 7 people (better known as “the majority of this blog’s readership”) don’t tell me differently, I’m going to use this theme as a foundation to do some things that I hope will get this blog ready for some new plans I’ve been kicking around.

Thanks to superstar Chris Brogan for inviting me to join him the other day for a Skype interview about Google+, publishing, customer loyalty and what exactly the heck I do. It turns out, Chris is one of the 12 people who read this blog. (Side thanks to Hammock videographer Gaby, who, after seeing this video, has made me rearrange my webcam so that in the future, I won’t appear like that scary gigantic-headed person in the famous 1984 Apple ad..) :

First off, of the 8,357 posts that have appeared on this blog, I can recall only one guest post. I have nothing against guest posts. Indeed, last week, this guest post from Kathy Sierra on Hugh MacLeod’s blog reminded me of how much I wish she still blogged. So, if there’s someone who doesn’t have a blog who I think needs a platform to say something I endorse, I can’t think of a reason to be against the idea of guest posts.

However, the fact that only 1/8,357ths of the posts on this blog have been “guest posts,” every day from spamdexers living on the underbelly of the internet, I receive email that starts like this:

“I was hoping to contribute to your SEO blog. I’ve been reading it and I’ve really enjoyed a number of your recent posts.”

As I don’t have an SEO blog, when the emailer says, “a number of your recent posts,” he is obviously referring to the number Zero.

As my finely-tuned spam filtration system sends such email to spam hell before I see it, I had to visit spam hell to find that request that hit my inbox, well, 15 minutes ago. After opening it, I was curious who was behind the pitch, so via a few clicks, I discovered the source — and no, I won’t link to it. Fortunately, it was not a name brand, or I would.

I often receive email from PR people who, similarly, haven’t read my blog but who perhaps assume what I write about here is a topic I may write about elsewhere. They pitch me to write something about their client on RexBlog and, typically, say how much they think my readers will be interested in their topic that has nothing to do with anything I’ve written about here before.. I ignore such email as I consider it spam, also.

I don’t mind email from anyone, PR people included, that suggests a topic or product or link I may be interested in — if it displays an understanding of what I’m actually interested in, and write about.

However, the surest way to have me do what I have learned to do to send all such future email to spam hell, is to prove, in the first few words, you are clueless.

[Note: This post is a Rexplanation.]

Feel free to read-along, but this post was written especially for my blog and Twitter friend, Mathew Ingram, who posted an article on Gigaom this afternoon with the subject line, “The Future of Media: Brands are Publishers Now Too.”

First, let me share something I heard a long time ago from Doc Searls. He was talking about blogs when he said it, but I say it often about the kinds of magazines your post suggests you think are something new. “There are magazines that are a business model, and there are magazines that support a business model.” For some reason, people who work for companies that have a media business model can’t seem to grasp that notion, even though it’s been true for, well, at least since 1895.

Companies have published such “non-media-business-model” magazines — real magazines with real editors and real journalists and designers, packed with great stories and art and not, as you describe them, “filled with canned marketing messages” since the 19th century. As this blog has about ten years worth of posts linking to articles where reporters declare such publishing “new” and I’ve been been helping companies publish magazines “not filled with canned marketing messages” for over two decades, I’ve got some old links to share with you, Matt.

But first off, let me declare from observing two decades of successful and unsuccessful media created for and by corporate brands: I can assure you that any publishing that is filled with canned marketing messages won’t last for one year, much less 115+ years, as John Deere’s “The Furrow” has. It started in 1895 and now is published worldwide for over a million farmers in 12 languages and in 40 countries.

At the other extreme, content-wise, I can also assure you that Colors Magazine has gone so far out of its way not to be filled with canned marketing messages, I doubt it’s ever mentioned who its publisher is (so I won’t either, as if I need to.)

And come to think of it, this blog has led to lots of business for my company, but posts like this are the closest it ever comes to being filled with canned marketing messages.

Here’s a link to a post on this blog that is nearly nine years old. It provides links to examples of magazines that were published in July of 1942 — that display that Brands were Publishers then too.

Here are a few brands mentioned in that post: John Deere’s The Furrow, DuPont, U.S. Steel, GM, New York Life Insurance, Merck and Harley-Davidson, Dutch Boy.

But if that’s not enough for you Matt, follow this link to the Custom Content Council, a trade group of North American companies (agencies) that help brands publish magazines — and all sorts of media. Today that trade group has nearly 100 company-agency members. When it started back in the late 1990s, it had less than ten. There are six founding companies, including the 20-year old Hammock Inc. that remain members. They represent small companies like ours, up to some of the largest media companies on earth.

The magazines — but today, we’re as likely to create and manage online properties or produce video — for corporate Brands by members of the Custom Content Council today are just a part of the $42 billion spent each year by companies that don’t have a media business model but who continue a century-plus tradition of producing media to support their business model.

[I've added a version of this post to the OFQ (occasionally asked questions) page of this blog. ]

Recently, I added the “WinerLinks plugin” to the WordPress software I use to publish RexBlog. (Plugins are snippets of code that add additional features or utility to WordPress.) The WinerLinks plugin adds a hyperlinked symbol “#” (the pound sign or hashtag) to the end of every paragraph. (Note: Temporarily, you can’t see them on the front page version of a post, but they’ll be visible there also, soon. If you’re reading this on the front page, click on the headline of this post and this post will make lots more sense ).

If you click on any of these hyperlinked hashtags, your browser will reorient the display of the page, moving that paragraph to the top of the browser window. You’ll also notice, if you look up at the “location bar” that the page’s URL will be appended with something that looks like this: “#p6″. This new, appended URL is, in effect, a “permalink” for each paragraph and not just for the top of the post. It’s somewhat like the idom, “chapter and verse,” these paragraph permalinks provide a structure that isolates both chapter (post) and verse (paragraph). That way, if someone wants to point to a specific paragraph and say, “Rex makes no sense here,” they can link to the exact spot.

The plugin’s creator, Daniel Bachhuber, named the paragraph permanlink plugin “WinerLinks” after a gourmet sausage made in the Napa Valley (blame Terry Heaton on that one.) Actually, the name refers to my friend, Dave Winer, who has used paragraph permalink hashtags on his blog, Scripting News, since the late 1950s when the internet was operated on a platform of pnuematic tubes.

A few years ago, when a couple told me they first met one-another through comments they posted on this blog, I was dumbfounded for two reasons: 1. Because this is more a “personal” blog than a “topical” blog, the “community of commenters” tends to be small and tightly focused. 2. As far as I know, that was the first time I’ve played even a minor role in introducing a future couple — I’d never even set up a blind date.

I thought their chance meeting was very wonderful, but no way did I think any such commenter match-making could ever be repeated.

So, when I was informed recently by another couple, now engaged, that they first discovered one-another through comments on this blog, I was even more flabergasted. What are the odds?

But perhaps there is some logic. While there’s not a lot of commenting on this blog, what does take place is civil and respectful of one-another. Perhaps because “Nashville” is a recurring focus, there is a sense of “place” that comes with it (although the engaged couple aren’t both from Nashville).

For whatever reason of fate or logic, I’m glad to say that “match-making” is a now officially one of many reasons why I blog.

And I’ve decided that I should suggest it’s a reason why more people should comment here (and, okay, on other blogs), as well. But only if you feel passionate about the topic of the post. I imagine it’s more a matter of two people discovering they share an interest than the mere fact they’ve crossed paths here.

And with my heartfelt best wishes, I’ll warn the second couple (and any others) what I warned the first couple, who, I’m glad to report, are still happily married (and about the most perfect couple you’ll ever meet): Please don’t blame me if things don’t work out. “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.”