I’ve seen advertising targeted at developers for a long time. DDJ & Linux Journal are full of them. But TV ads are somewhat of a new territory. But I’ve realised that more and more, open source projects are doing video adverts. What really struck it home for me was seeing the anouncement for the new Google Update Engine:
It’s an advert if ever I saw one. Yes, it’s a tech presentation, but it’s an advert.
Video for developers is something that’s been growing for a while. One of the reasons for Rails taking off was the screencast showing how simple it was to get started. And I learned tonnes about Textmate from the screencasts that Allan Odgaard posted to the textmate blog.
But it’s not just the flashy GUI things that have videos. If an XML writing library can have a video introduction, what can’t?
It’s great that we have these resources, as developers. I certainly didn’t think I’d see such focused media that I’m actually interested in. But as a developer, it does raise the bar for getting your project noticed.
Jabbering Giraffe 