I really dig this post by Anil Dash, specifically the part about Geek Marketing as a web trend for 2006:
...geeks really need to learn how to explain their skills, the benefits of their skills, and the business advantages provided by those benefits. Knowing half a dozen programming languages won't help you if you can't communicate with the people who want to hire you. And your language/platform/development environment of choice won't succeed unless you do a great job of evangelizing it and promoting it to others, including non-technical people.
Absolutely agreed. However, I think this is a trend that's been around for a while. The really solid engineers who are writing their own tickets can already communicate well. What I think is more of a trend for 2006 is that good marketers and general non-technical business-types will start listening more to the engineers who take an active interest in business goals and customer needs. An engineer could have (and at my job, often does have) the greatest ideas to increase conversion, improve UI or construct killer features that will result in incredible upside, but we need to be able to hear it. Communication requires two entities, and as the barriers to start-up and maintain great new businesses decreases, it will be the marketers who can't make the effort to understand the technnology avaliable and its applications who will be marginalized in the Web 2.0 economy.
O'Reilly books aren't just for engineers.
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