Actually it was last month – March 2008 – when I got my turn for book review. Personal note here, I didn’t got any opportunity to do ANY case reviews! Goddangit. There was some fiasco in term of scheduling so I got TWO book reviews in row! Boy, am I tired or what?

Anyway, I took this book. Yep, Net, Blogs and Rock ‘n’ Roll by David Jennings. I found this book at Kinokuniya Plaza Senayan with a price freakingly 300,000 IDR (US$ 30 or so.) The main reason I bought this book is because my thesis for my Master degree is about New Media (Web 2.0) and this book covers nearly 80% of my thesis topic. Damnit, with a price of a reference book like that, I HAVE TO GRADUATE THIS YEAR.

Okay, where were we? Oh yeah, the book review. Lets go through this book one by one, shall we?

Jakob Nielsen on Internet User Experience

Our usability guru, Jakob Nielsen, mentioned two things which I found it quite important regarding user experience.

1. Design sites and services that support the activity as effectively as possible.
   I believe that many IT and web designers/programmers/experts understand this rule of thumb. Maximum ‘clicks’ that needed inside a website is three clicks. More than that will be considered as a hassle. Take a look at Seth Godin’s experience here (The World’s Worst Toaster.)
2. Remember that users spend most of their time on other sites than your own.
   There are two possibilities why this kind of thing happened: 1.) Other websites are more interesting, 2.) Your website is fuckingly boring, dumb, got-too-many-clicks and idiotic. I prone to #2, thanks.

Producer AND Consumer (Procon)

In our conventional world, there are two types of people (when we are talking about trading, business and companies): Producer and Consumer.

In many cases, it always goes one-way. The producers are making the products and giving it to the consumers. Sure enough that the consumers could give some feedbacks but then it couldn’t be done simultaneously.

And that’s where this Web 2.0 plays a major role. Thanks to Web 2.0, now Internet is more to user-generated content. People could be anything there, be it them as producers or consumers. Or both.

Take Youtube for example. Lets just say that I want to download Sherlock Holmes Granada TV Series from Youtube; in that case, I act as consumer because basically I took stuffs from Youtube. But then in the same time, I also upload a video about recent campus’ event in Youtube so I could show it to my friends online. In that case, I act as producer because I’m giving the video.

So I’m no longer a producer or consumer. I am both. Procon. Producer and Consumer. Everybody could be anybody and they could go back-and-forth whether they want to download or upload.

Trying Out, Links and Community (TLC)

In this Information era, it’s pretty hard for us, marketers to do the promotion in ol’ skool ways. Consumers becoming smarter and they even block some information that they see as unnecessary.

This where I would point a thing called ‘Information filtering’. There already too much information around us, too many advertisements, promotions and news which could confuse us and subconsciously our mind formed an ‘information filter’ where we could filter out the information and take the thing that interest us only or necessary for us. Let the others went to junk.

This thing is a challenge for every marketer in the world. During 1950s, it would be goddamn easy for a company to promote because everybody’s eyes were glued to the television. They watch TV with high enthusiasm and they even waited for TV commercials. In short, the market during the old days was easy to be steered.

Now? We have hundreds of TV channels, newspapers, magazines, interactive advertisements… The Internet. The information piling up, cluttered everywhere. One should filter it for himself/herself or he/she will get overwhelmed.

Interesting enough, this kind of ‘filtering information’ has been mentioned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle during 1870s.

I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that
he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.

Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order.

It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

- Sherlock Holmes (A Study in Scarlet)

Biologically we already got our ‘filter’ inside our brain. Some people would say it as ‘forgetful’ but then it proves that we tend to shun away some unnecessary information. A husband that works from dawn till dusk at the office might forget his wedding anniversary because he thinks that it would be his second priority compared to, lets just say, the upcoming big project at his office.

So how we could lure the consumers in this vast development of Internet? Let them lure themselves then.

Everybody always have their own ‘primitive’ side. The curiosity, the demand of knowing more, learning more, reading more… And that’s what we should use to lure them. Let them curious then they will follow the path.

First off, Trying Out.

I couldn’t say alot about this one, but this is a good example: Amazon.

When you buy a book at Amazon, high probability they will give you this message: “Customers who bought books by writer A also bought book by these writers…”

Amazon didn’t ‘force’ the consumers to see and buy more books per se, but then at least that would trigger even the tiniest brain-cell when they say that “some other people like you are buying other books so maybe you would like to take a look, just in case it interests you.”

Second, Links.

O the big world of Internet! Everybody is linking everybody right now. You clicked a link at PopURLs then you will be send straight to Digg, Del.icio.us, Slashdot, Yahoo! and many more!

Nuff said.

Third, Community.

The most powerful force within the Internet. People.

When two or more people gather together with same interest and they could bring out a helluva idea from it, then you could start a regime then, and the border-less Internet helps to increase the traffic.

For example, you want to listen to the latest song and in the same time you want to have some friends. Where you could go? Maybe you could go to Last.fm.

Then you want to meet old friends, hookup with your online buddies, becoming trolls, lurkers, perverts and many freakos, you could go to Friendster.

This type of community is growing and they becoming stronger. How to tap into this thing? Buzz words and viral marketing

Actually there are lots of thing that being covered inside this book, but I’m too lazy to type it down here and that would make YOU lazy to read so nyah, buy the book and read the book