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When I started working here at Socialsquare, not many months ago, I didn’t entirely grasp the worldview that has driven and motivated the company from its founding three years ago.

That worldview is clearly about the groundbreaking importance of participation and conversation on-line, which I know very well from my anthropological fieldwork in the open source development community around Ubuntu Linux, but it had a different angle, a different twist, which I didn’t recognize.

It was the focus on markets as conversations, on helping businesses and organisations participate in the open, earnest and human conversation that takes place online. On occasion I had heard Thomas describe this worldview as Cluetrain-ish.

Unfamiliar with the term, I found it to be a reference to the website cluetrain.com where the Cluetrain Manifesto resides. And this weekend, at a Socialsquare strategy seminar, I realized that that statement contains the basic realizations upon which Socialsquare was founded.

To understand the full impact of the Cluetrain manifesto, consider Thomas Petzinger’s foreword:

Not long ago I was sitting in the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco on a reporting mission for “The Front Lines,” a weekly column I spent four years writing for The Wall Street Journal. Between interviews, I was checking e-mail from my readers. (The Internet puts me in touch with thousands of them who act as my scouts.) On this particular day, one of my correspondents urged me to check out a new site at www.cluetrain.com.

I was dumbstruck. There, in a few pages, I read a startlingly concise summary of everything I’d seen in twenty-one years as a reporter, editor, bureau chief, and columnist for my newspaper. The idea that business, at bottom, is fundamentally human. That engineering remains second-rate without aesthetics. That natural, human conversation is the true language of commerce. That corporations work best when the people on the inside have the fullest contact possible with the people on the outside.

And most importantly, that however ancient, timeless, and true, these principles are just now resurging across the business world. The triggering event, of course, is the advent of a global communication system that restores the banter of the bazaar, that tears down power structures and senseless bureaucracies, that puts everyone in touch with everyone.

That is exactly what Socialsquare is about. Now all I have to do is read the rest of the book. :-)