From jay.kominek@colorado.edu Thu Mar 22 11:35:11 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: kominek@ucsub.colorado.edu X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_0_4); 22 Mar 2001 19:35:10 -0000 Received: (qmail 87439 invoked from network); 22 Mar 2001 19:35:09 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by l9.egroups.com with QMQP; 22 Mar 2001 19:35:09 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO ucsub.colorado.edu) (128.138.129.12) by mta1 with SMTP; 22 Mar 2001 19:35:09 -0000 Received: from ucsub.colorado.edu (kominek@ucsub.colorado.edu [128.138.129.12]) by ucsub.colorado.edu (8.10.0/8.10.0/ITS-5.0/standard) with ESMTP id f2MJZ9E10915 for ; Thu, 22 Mar 2001 12:35:09 -0700 (MST) Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2001 12:35:09 -0700 (MST) To: Subject: Re: [lojban] Marketing lojban In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20010322095151.00c2c980@127.0.0.1> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII From: Jay Kominek X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 6130 On Thu, 22 Mar 2001, Bob LeChevalier (lojbab) wrote: > I welcome such, but observe that as yet we have limited means with which to > advertise, beyond word of mouth, and limited ability to deal with response > to advertisements. > Advertising would just lead to more response than we could deal with. JCB > apparently got thousands of responses to his Scientific American article in > June 1960, and thousands more when he advertised Loglan 1 in that magazine > in the mid 70s. Setup an email alias along the lines of lojban-info@lojban.org, sucker anybody you can into being put onto the list of people who receive email sent to that address. Then let _those_ people deal with the random information inquiries. Sure you'd have to sort of quiz them to make sure they'd all read the FAQ and they were familiar with the web page to find all the easy answers, but thats a one-time investment. > We need to have more stuff - LOTS more stuff - and it cannot be so > dependent on my meager abilities, before any massive increase in interest > can be sustained. Elaborate on 'LOTS more stuff'? (Or is the rest of the email the elaboration?) > Plans? It is hard to make plans when we have neither human nor fiscal > resources. We proceed from day to day, with rather nebulous ideas of where > we want to go next. That doesn't seem terribly good. :/ While, sure, you might not have much in the way of human or fiscal resources, you've got all kinds of people on the list, many of whom are just drooling waiting for a concrete idea for something they can do to help. Surely you need direction for when you do get a burst of human and fiscal resources. > People are doing this. Look at the ever increasing numbers of Lojban Web > pages - three years ago there was Veijo's helsinki site and not much else. Web pages don't do a whole lot to spread the word. They're passive, after all, and if a web page is written purely in Lojban, a search engine isn't likely to turn it up as a hit to any request not already in Lojban. > There is a volunteer page on the LLG web site. Where? I see a very short list of things in the FAQ, which can be summarized (gracelessly) as: * Learn Lojban * Write things in Lojban, simple at first then harder * Send that stuff to the mailing list * Send us money All well and good, but only the money part will help anyone else, really. Where is the better list at? > People have not been too helpful on the dictionary effort, which is one of > the highest priorities, possibly because too few have a good idea what is > needed, or because the workpile is so immense that one's individual > contribution seems like it would be minimal rather than decisive. On the part of the web page I'm looking at, it says "Volunteers are sought to aid in preparing these lists for use as dictionary files. Contact [us]." I want to help, but I've try to make it a point to never volunteer for something without knowing what it is. Maybe if you expanded on what is involved in preparation? > While I made an improvement to the main website a year ago, it probably > needs at least one more level of improvement in order to be really useful, > and we need more stuff being updated on it on a more regular basis. If you maybe gave it a once over so it was organized a bit less like a pretty FTP site, and then added something regularly (however simple, mention the latest philosophical discussion on the mailing list) the web page would feel a lot more alive and people would be more motivated to look at it. (Oh, and date stuff better, and get rid of copies of things which are out of date so people aren't worried they're downloading a worthless copy of the gismu list or something.) I suspect it sounds like I'm being very pushy. I don't mean to be, I'm just getting a lot of stuff off my chest that I've been thinking about since I became interested in Lojban. To mitigate that pushiness and put my free time where my mouth is, I'd love to assist with anything I've mentioned. Two more things while I'm typing. In one of my previous (first?) mailings to the list I mentioned that I thought somebody should run a news site (sort of like Balvi, except oriented more towards daily news and short pieces). I took my own advice and I've got a news site mostly setup (99.99% Lojban). Now I'm interested in some people who would 1) like to check my Lojban (I'm not an expert Lojbanist, and in fact I'm quite nervous about the quality. It is admittedly a much larger undertaking than a novice should be attempting, but I felt it important anyways) and 2) write short pieces to be posted to the site. That should be fairly easy enough. Just go to some web sites that release company press releases verbatim and write original text with the releases as your source. Not as great as having field reporters and such, but it should do for starters and its legal. (The site also has an editorial section for brief opinion pieces on news related topics.) Second (and last, I'm almost done. :) is that at one point I started reformatting the draft textbook in LaTeX so I could print it out and have something pleasent to look at it. Its a metric buttload of work, so I stopped because it wasn't worth my time for just myself. (I was also correcting errors and bringing it up to date) Would it be worthwhile to finish, or is it too out of date? Is there some LLI-internal version thats up to date? I'm I even legally allowed to modify it? (The copyright and licensing of materials on the Lojban site is questionable due to the 'latest version' clause of the Lojban General License.) - Jay Kominek It's not just 8-bit clean, It's 8-bit spotless!