It’s been five years since the posting of the Cluetrain Manifesto to the Web’s door. One of the co-authors, David Weinberger, writes on it here.

Weinberger writes that the ideas in that document were ambient. The authors didn’t create them; they were there waiting for expression.

But, ideas they were, and no less revolutionary.

In media, the impact of those ideas shows.

Cluetrain #12: “There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.”

Staid outlets found a surprise recently when 18-year-old college student Brian Stelter scooped them on revealing the upcoming CNN broadband feed. He’s not a journalist; he’s a college student who blogs under the name Cablenewser.

Cluetrain #39: “The community of discourse is the market.”

Witness Goskokie. The site bills itself as “news for the people, by the people,” and its an experiment by a group of Medill students. It features open, publicly accessible Weblogs where visitors can post community news and photos.

Cluetrain #68: “The inflated self-important jargon you sling around - in the press, at your conferences - what’s that got to do with us?”

The natural language of blogs such as Back to Iraq, Talking Points Memo and Daily Howler helps both define and declare their audiences. And many of them now have 24-hour hit totals that exceed the circulation of a medium-sized local daily. I’m not saying we should throw out our grammars and cast off the twin yokes of style books and fairness. What I am saying is media should follow the advice in those books: Keep it simple and natural. Transparency and fairness will follow.

Cluetrain #84: To traditional corporations, networked conversations may appear confused, may sound confusing. But we are organizing faster than they are. We have better tools, more new ideas, no rules to slow us down.

The Web is less perfect than printed or broadcast media. That flows from its organic nature. In lieu of a static, one-time snapshot of events, we now have dynamic evolving accounts from a thousand angles. That idea, perhaps reflexively, threatens the fact-advocate sensibilities of many journalists.

As Goskokie shows, one possible future for disseminati lies in the moderation and management of conversations. There are many others.

A place for a factual conscience persists in new modes of media. The tools are the same, though the angle at which they are held may change slightly.