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: