Links and Things

These are just a few links I have found while looking for information on viral marketing and designing for mobile phones while surfing the web.

Viral Marketing
This is a link to an article on generating interest in a product or event using viral marketing techniques. It has some good strategies on how to manage a viral campaign, such as how to keep track of what people are saying about you (good or bad) by keeping an eye on blog comments and messageboards via RSS feeds. It also goes into some detail on the technique of link baiting, the proccess of assessing how link-worthy your content is and attracting the right kind of people who will link to you, thus maximising traffic through using your audience.

The second link is a blog post on what it means for something to be viral. One of the main things I drew from this was that the ideas behind a lot of viral adverts are quite shallow, most of the time out of necessity, as things which are easy to understand and instantly entertaining are going to be much quicker to spread around that something thought provoking which takes time to sink in.

Designing for Mobile Devices
These two links focus mostly on the technical side of designing for small screens such as those of mobile phones. The first is a link to Mike Davidson's blog, where he suggests four easy steps that will create a mobile version of your site. I found the image comparisons half way through the article quite interesting. They were from sites which I would have expected to already have used mobile friendly technology, especially Gizmodo, but I guess that goes to show how under-developed and underused this technology is. The second link deals with compatibility, and shows how certain tags and page elements are displayed on verious devices. It has some pretty useful tips on how to make your site easy to use on a mobile device.