I am so not a nudist. I am not even a no-shirt-ist. Given a choice, I would wear underwear under my underwear, and all public changing rooms would be required by statute to have full-length doors. Nevertheless, I spent 11 months prancing around buck naked on the Web.

No webcams were involved, and although my email inbox indicates that I am apparently quite popular with the coeds, no explicit sexual acts were recorded. My nakedness was of the type that is far more humiliating for an author: I published my rough drafts every day on a public website. Not since Katie Couric treated the audience of the "Today Show" to the view from the business end of a proctoscope has anyone felt as exposed.

I had to do it. I'd trapped myself. In my previous book -- The Cluetrain Manifesto -- I'd written in passing that the Web was turning documents into perpetual works-in-progress rather than finished objects that are only visible once they are done and published. So, when it came time to start work on my next book, I felt obliged to write it in public, from start to finish.

I had some good reasons (in addition to my foolish pride): I was likely to get helpful comments on the site's discussion board. Errors of every sort would be discovered before the book was locked onto paper. And I was not entirely unaware that the experiment might generate some early buzz.

The experiment met all these expectations, although usually not quite the way I'd anticipated. The discussion of the chapters did indeed range all over the lot, which was both very useful and distracting. At one end, people pronounced edicts on grammar and usage about which reasonable people may disagree but about which unreasonable people can flame and rail and become surprisingly abusive. At the other end, I got detailed, thoughtful commentaries on the substantive ideas in the book that kept me from going wrong at times and, more important, prevented me from looking terminally foolish in print.

But the greatest help turned out to be not intellectual but emotional. You see, the writing of Small Pieces did not go well. I remember when I went to my agents' house to discuss my first chapter with them. "What do you think of it?" they asked. I pursed my lips, nodded, and said: "Pretty good. Not polished, of course. But I think I laid out the issues pretty well. I thought the development of the formal ways in which the Web could be considered a world was compelling." David put down his slice of pizza. Lisa turned in her seat and contemplated their refrigerator with a gaze that caused the compressor to activate. Oh, they tried to be gentle, but it was clear that they didn't think the chapter was as far along as I thought. More exactly, they thought it sucked.

I didn't know it at the time, but they were right. And it took me five months of thrashing to figure out how to talk about the ideas that were compelling me to write -- how the Web is transforming the bedrock concepts by which we understand what it is to be human in a world shared with other humans. My way of thrashing is to write. So, I wrote draft after draft of chapter after chapter -- 1,000 bad words on a bad day and 2,500 bad words on a good day. That's a lot of bad words. And every one of the little stinkers was posted for the world to see on my Website. And indexed and archived by the Web's omnivorous spiders.

This was not a lot of fun for anyone, including me. Yes, despite the dreck I was inflicting on them, my pre-readers were my greatest support. A handful of them could read my despair between the lines and jumped in with kind enthusiasm that went way beyond cheerleading. They kept reminding me, in email, on the site, and even in person, what was worthwhile about the project. They had lots of advice about how to get the writing on track, and some of it was right and valuable, but more important to me was the emotional bulwark they provided. What started out as an experiment in the dry arts of editing and the development of ideas revealed its true purpose in the messy embrace of emotion. And when I finally hit my stride and was writing in a way that people might actually enjoy reading -- I am proudest that the reviews so far consistently say that the book is "entertaining" -- they were there telling me what worked and what didn't.

Would I do this again? Absolutely. Perhaps I'd highlight the latest completed rough drafts of chapters and make it a tad harder to find the ones currently being run through the digital platen, thus accomplishing my twin aims of (1) giving pre-readers a reasonable chunk on which to comment and (2) embarrassing myself. But I got so much out of this experiment that I'd be a fool not to do it again.