MBA 604 Course Guide: Texts & Resources

| course description & student objectives || syllabus |
| texts & resources || assignments & evaluation |
| special requirements & self-assessment || software competencies |

| course web || deep thinkers || new media marketing || associations |
| journals || lists and newsgroups || hypertext || design || style |
| a note about paper |

The Web browser on your desk or lap has an Internet connection. It is the door to the biggest library, by far the biggest library. Most of that library didn't exist three years ago and it's growing so fast you'll never figure out how big it is. Not only that, it has lots of important and valuable information that would never be stored in a traditional library. Indeed, the Web takes us so far beyond information glut that the trick is knowing when to turn the computer off and get some sleep!

For more on searching the Web ...

Course Web

This course web (lower-case "w" as opposed to the "World Wide Web") can bring you up to date, can practice what it preaches, and can point you in the right directions on the Web. In short, we will put a textbook amount of reading on the course web and provide links to a library's worth. We don't expect any of you to read -- or to need -- all of it. However, if you're going to progress towards the course objectives, I do expect all of you to read -- and to need -- much of it. It's up to you to balance your learning style against these resources.

Evaluation of your work will presume you know your way around the sites and documents below as well as the rest of our course web.

Elsewhere on this web we toss around some terms loosely that we need to clarify for the purposes of this resources page.

define.gif (6425 bytes)

Few of the resources here are exclusively on either end. Most would fill the middle left.

Note: We have tried to reduce the redundancy between this page and other pages in the course web. However, several links that you'll find here you'll also find elsewhere.

Newbie Newz

If you're new to the Internet, you'll find it very easy to get help. The many sites differ more in style than substance. If a site called Learn the Net doesn't appeal to you, try WebTeacher or Life on the Internet. The folks at ZiffDavis give you the basics from a marketer's perspective. Linked to that web on ZDNet, you'll find an e-commerce primer.

When I started, none of these was available, so I'm not sure how to recommend them. Your feedback that made me take a site off this list or add one to it would be most welcome.

Deep Thinkers nick.gif (7027 bytes)

Back in 1995, this proud fellow, Nicholas Negroponte, published a book with Knopf called Being Digital. It's a little out of date and old enough that some of its predictions are coming due.

However, it is still a terrific introduction to new media from the long-time head of MIT's New Media Lab.

The book collected and stitched together Negroponte's columns for Wired. Now, the book is available on line -- for free: table of contents. Most of the links are internal but many take you out of the book in a way impossible when it was in its ink-on-paper version.

The folks who published it in this form invite your participation. In their Introduction, they call it the cyberdock version of the book, "featuring the book's text files as a stable casting-off point, from which the reader is invited to explore the Internet Sea on one of the many 'URL-boats' tied to the dock." And, indeed, to submit a URL-boat of your own.

For background, try David Bennahum's interview with Nicholas Negroponte in Meme. While you're there, look at the index and try the interviews with Seymour Papert and Douglas Englebart.

The Social Life of Documents
A long overview of our 500-year love affair with paper. Must reading.

The Birth of the Fantasy Amplifier
A chapter about Alan Kay from Howard Rheingold's Tools for Thought.

to come:

Powerful Ideas Need Love, Too
Alan Kay congressional testimony from October 1995.

Don Norman

How long would you wait?

Douglas Englebart invented the "mouse" in 1962. The little critter didn't get that name until fifteen years later. Most of you never used one until a few years ago. In the May 20, 1996, US News, Englebart said:

The rate at which a person can mature is directly proportional to the embarrassment he can tolerate.

New Media Marketing

beaucoup.gif (2169 bytes) Beaucoup's Malls list has links to cyber malls as well as home pages of 80-some large corporations from Adobe to Xerox.

Internet Marketing Center

Web Marketing Information Center has links to hundreds of recent articles in dozens of categories

Associations

Advertising Research Foundation	International Marketing Institute
American Academy of Advertising	International Tech Services Marketing Assn
American Assn of Advertising Agencies	Internet Marketing and Advertising Assn
American Marketing Association	Marketing Science Institute
Business Marketing Association	NVvM, Dutch association for market research
Computer and Electronics Marketing Assn	Pi Sigma Epsilon (college marketing fraternity)
Direct Electronic Mail Marketing Assn	Professional Pricing Society
Direct Marketing Association	Professional Soc of Sales & Marketing Training
French Association of Marketing	Public Relations Society of America
Industrial Marketing Group	Retail Advertising and Marketing Association
Institute for the Study of Business Markets	Sales and Marketing Executives International
Institute of Public Relations	Society for Consumer Psychology

Journals

Popular Journals and Electronic Magazines (or EZines)

You'll find dozens of links like these at The Web Marketing Info Center's EZine page.

Who's Marketing Online "the world behind the Web"

American Demographics: Consumer Trends for Business Leaders

New York Times, Cybertimes Index You'll need to register (free) to get very far

The Weekly Guerilla by Jay Conrad Levinson and Charles Rubin

Inc. Online has profiles of successful online businesses

The best print resources for keeping up with new media and electronic commerce are newspapers and magazines such as:

InfoWorld
Internet World (Web Week until Feb 98)
New Media
Interactivity

Even better are their Web sites, which have all the text without all the ads. You'll find up-to-the-hour coverage of the digital world at Hot Wired. It offers news briefs and in-depth reporting on politics, business, culture, and technology. Check out the Dream Jobs section. We used the marketing knowledge and skills parts of the job descriptions to help shape this course. Hot Wired also has a bleeding-edge style that continually amazes me. Similar but tamer publications include c|net and any of the major newspapers online.

Academic marketing journals

I excerpted this long list from a very much longer one Paul Driessen edits at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

Lists and Newsgroups

Liszt and Reference.com will connect you to hundreds of newsgroups and mailing lists devoted to marketing topics. Deja News will let you search the text of all of them .. we're talking about many gigabytes of material. The results of these archive searches are a great way to get

up to speed on the latest in a field

in touch with experts on many topics

Keeping up with a current list or newsgroup is a great way to listen in on professional conversations. For example, we lurk on the web-design list. By "lurk," we mean that we read without ever posting. The active members of the list are webmasters for Fortune 500 companies and creative directors of cutting-edge new media marketing shops. No book in any library or bookstore has this information. We'd pay hundreds of dollars an hour to "consult" with these folks. Yet there they are exchanging tips and critiques and making recommendations. Wow.

Hypertext

Doug Brent has a native hypertext called Rhetorics of the Web. A lousy title for a fascinating attempt. It not only has information you need, it has an attitude you might think about adopting.

The leading site for commercial hypertext is Eastgate Systems.

The web for Doug's recent course on hypertext is still up. Some of the material, you may notice, has made its way onto this marketing web.

H
O
W

B
I
G
?

Say you go to a site like Eastgate's and want to read it all. But first you'd like to know how big it really is.

Go to Altavista. Type

host:www.eastgate.com

and you'll get a list of every page linked from that address.

Design

There are as many ways to design webs as there are designers. One that makes sense to me is Ben Schneiderman's way in Designing information-abundant web sites: issues and recommendations. It has an interesting interactive demonstration, but the browser you're using needs to support frames. If it doesn't, that's a clear sign that it's time for you to get a new browser.

You'll find more interface design material on the toLearn hypertext web.

Style

Wouldn't it be great to have a style manual at hand when you sit down to design your web for this course? Well, search no more. As best I can tell, here's the most influential:

Lynch, Patrick. Web Style Manual. New Haven: Yale Center for Advanced Instructional Media, 1997.

Wouldn't it be great to have similar manuals for desktop publishing, graphics, etc.? Well, they're out there, lots of them. One of the challenges of this course will be to find the one that's right for you.

A Note about Paper

We will not use a common dead-tree version of a textbook for this course. Why? It typically takes two years for a traditional paper publisher to turn a finished manuscript into a textbook ready for the first day of class. To be ready for class today, the manuscript would have frozen in March 1996. That's okay if the subject is Shakespeare. Not much has happened in Shakespeare studies in the past two years.

But in March 1996 ...

the Web had far more text and far fewer graphics

far fewer people had access, especially at home

the browsers didn't do much fancy stuff

the cutting edge modem wasn't half as fast as today's most common

hardly anyone spent money online; access and information was "free"

Any textbook from back then has inadequate and false information through no fault of its own.

==========

notes:

Assessing Java for Electronic Commerce

February 1998 DBMS magazine

http://www.inquiry.com/pubs/index.html

First Monday -- provocative articles on e-commerce in every issue

http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/index.html

last update: November 02, 1998
http://toLearn.net/marketing/texts.htm