Great book - buy it and read it! Here's a short overview:
"Imagine what would have happened if we had deliberately set about building the web... We would have planned it, budgeted for it, project managed it... and we would have failed miserably. It grew bottom-up. The designers weighed perfection against growth and creativity, and perfection lost." (<-- let that be a lesson to all taxonomy experts and intranet/portal designers)
In a physical store, we browse (we made the effort to travel to the shop, may as well look around) - leads to impulse buying (supermarkets take advantage - 'strategically' place items to encourage additional sales, e.g. roses next to beer...) On the web, any inconvenience annoys and we leave without buying anything - all sites are within equal reach. People will only stay if they are interested.
At the post office, you wait in turn... all hail the line! When you fill in a web form, there is no line. You control your time. No permission is required, or asked, to leave and rejoin the form. No polite excuses needed if you decide to abandon a page mid-senta...
Real opinions versus corporate speak. The language is different. Marketing = perfect picture. Opinion = experience. (When you buy a book, camera, whatever, where do you go today? I check out the feedback on Amazon. When did you last read the marketing brochure?)
Inconsistent feels familiar --> irrational behaviour rules! When we do a search on the web, seeing what we are looking for as item number 14 in the results list = success. Yet, if we had to ask a person 14 times before they gave us the right answer = failure. On the other hand, when we leave a message on a phone, we allow a person time to respond. When we ask via email, we expect an instant answer.
We choose, we decide. Discussions continue only whilst we find them interesting = efficient. On September 11th, 2001, when other channels failed, the web and instant messaging/text messages became a first-person news network
Idle gossip = fun in the right context (water cooler chat), dangerous in the wrong one ("they did what??!!!!"). Humans understand the subtleties of context in ways that computers never will. Putting knowledge in a database requires it to become context-free and universal --> wrong, wrong, wrong. The context is what turns information into knowledge in the first place...
The Internet works because it is broken... just like us. It feels real, in ways no other technology system ever has. It's connecting us with each other, ignoring hierarchies and rules... "We've been sorting through human claims and ideas for millenia. We're actually pretty good at it. But we don't have one standard procedure or methodology. We just have ways of listening" The web is all about conversation. It is becoming interactive.