Pattern Imposter

Problem: How do you on-line market your software to hoards of cynical developers?

Context: Marketing guy at another software firm looking for more eyeballs.

Forces:

• People are learning to filter spam (and dross) from their email.
• You've just come across wiki and think there must be a way to exploit it.
• If you dress your commercial up as a pattern people in the pattern community might just read it.

Solution: Write up the commercial as a pattern and dump it on wiki. Under solution, say "sorry, I don't have a general solution, but you can buy this..."

Example: ZootSoftware (Sorry, I couldn't help it - Personally, I wouldn't have felt so bad about it if you'd just written it up as a commercial.)

Related Paterns: DoMyHomeworkForMe? (as seen on the pattern mailing lists)

Maybe I'm just one of those cynical developers ;-) --

AppropriateWikiTopics

Sounds like a special case of a more general advertising pattern, let's call it Imposter. I can already think of three examples:

• ZootSoftware
• Infomercials
• Banner ads that mimic OS dialogs (see http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/00/02/index1a.html)