timake.com

I'm reading Seth Godin's book Tribes, which is a good introduction to the new model of how online communities work, how to lead one, and what are the dynamics of leading a group of connected individuals on the Internet. It's good reading - and the method Seth used of building excitement around the book was pretty interesting.

Seth built an online community called Triiibes, and sent an email out to people subscribed to his blog saying that if you pre-ordered the book, he'd give you a login to his online community that was all about the book - how to build a tribe, what tools are available, etc.

This built great excitement around the book, and caused a lot of people to pre-order it in order to gain access to the online community. I think there were lots of good by-products of the community, including a resulting Q&A book that followed on to the initial book release. The community helped write this Q&A book, so it's gravy for Seth - his "tribe" helped him create content for his site!

It's a great book / community / site / amalgam of lots of different things - pretty interesting model. I definitely recommend it.