I wanted to share this discovering with you all, check the following link:

http://www.ideavirus.com/

It belongs to a book named "Unleashing the Ideavirus", by Seth Godin, and it's a very interesting text on alternative marketing (even if it could be our future mainstream). I highly recommend it, specially for those interested in e-commerce, as all of you here are most probably to be.

Best regards,

I read Seth Godin's The Big Red Fez earlier this year, and I thought it had some good ideas -- it's a book about web site design. I didn't like his writing style though, which was too personal, opinionated, and negative (i.e. stuff like "this site sucks because my grandma can't figure out how to order"). He overemphasized what not to do, as opposed to what to do.

A book on this subject I found more practical and helpful was Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think. Whereas Godin's book was mostly a hodgepodge of examples of sites that offended him in some way, Krug's book built a solid foundation of design and testing principles and then showed how to apply them to create a good site from scratch, with lots of real-world examples from sites like CNET and Amazon. What I liked most about Krug's book is that he took actual pages from real sites and showed his own redesigned versions of them, according to his own design principles.

Both books are quick reads and can be polished off in an afternoon.

Interesting, he writes a book on web design, but there's a few things about his site that I think are weird enough to mention.

First, the layout is framed and changes (ie. the Get Now page looks completely different from the main page). This is confusing and inconsistant imo. Secondly, downloading the book requires going through no less than 4 redirect pages to get to it. Is this some attempt to keep people from Right-Click Save As? I wanted to save it and read it later and it was a pain to go through all those pages and manually hunt down the links (not to mention that people shouldn't be expected to know how to do this...).

Is this the sort of stuff he preaches in his web design book? Any clues to why these choices were made? I'm not trying to toss down the guy before I read his work but this site design is odd.

As a webdesigner, I must say wasn't impressed much by its site too. Nothing wrong, but nothing particularly attractive.
And the buttons don't even have mouse-over graphics... :)

This book is more about alternative marketing (viral marketing and the alike) than web based stuff, I'd recommend it for some interesting ideas it has that might be directly applicable for the games business.

Worth a check at least :)

Best regards,

"The Secrets of Word-Of-Mouth Marketing", by George Silverman. Another interesting book on alternative marketing I found (and that maybe somebody recommended here before, or was it the most known 'world mouth' one?).

There seems to be a new hype on the word of mouth subject nowadays...

Best regards,