From jay.kominek@colorado.edu Fri Jul 20 07:46:28 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: kominek@ucsub.colorado.edu X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_2_0); 20 Jul 2001 14:46:28 -0000 Received: (qmail 89450 invoked from network); 20 Jul 2001 14:45:39 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by l9.egroups.com with QMQP; 20 Jul 2001 14:45:39 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO ucsub.colorado.edu) (128.138.129.12) by mta2 with SMTP; 20 Jul 2001 14:45:39 -0000 Received: from ucsub.colorado.edu (kominek@ucsub.colorado.edu [128.138.129.12]) by ucsub.colorado.edu (8.11.2/8.11.2/ITS-5.0/student) with ESMTP id f6KEjdd11143 for ; Fri, 20 Jul 2001 08:45:39 -0600 (MDT) Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 08:45:39 -0600 (MDT) To: Subject: Re: [lojban] how can i help lojban? what can $ do? In-Reply-To: <9j9ckb+cogk@eGroups.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII From: Jay Kominek X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 8775 On Fri, 20 Jul 2001 thinkit8@lycos.com wrote: > i try to start discussions in jbosnu, so we can start using the > language. so far that's gone pretty well. i don't want to try to > change the language myself, or i'll end up wanting to write my own! I for one appreciate your attempts on jbosnu even if I don't get involved in them. > i tried giving money to lojbab, but apparently he didn't even cash > the checks in time. i think the lojban cause is supremely important, > so where should i send money to help it along to? I think he is taking money via paypal now, which maybe is more convinent for him? > i'm wondering if a lot of money thrown on the problem would make > things worse or better? i suppose we could get people on things full > time to develop and evangelize. You could pay people to learn the language, and then pay them to write stuff in it. Thats sort of excessive, though. I would like to mention that within the last few days I ran an ad on Google for Lojban. (I spent about $4 total on it, so it was worth it for an experiment.) The ad read something like: Lojban The Logical Language For unambiguous communication (I changed the text of it a couple of times to see if something would start generating a better response.) 270 people viewed it, 2 people clicked on it, for a click-through of 0.74% which is just slightly below the average click through for an ad on the Internet, of 1%. I used keywords like "Loglan", "Interlingua", "Klingon Language", "Artificial Language", "Constructed Language", and "Predicate Logic". Interlingua was responsible for one click, Predicate Logic for the other. I'm not sure how to interpret the results, but hopefully nobody is upset by this. (Btw, only two people searched for "loglan" in the couple of days that my ad was running.) > what could, for example, a ten million dollar boost do to the project? I realize you're being hypothetical, but maybe it would be more productive to be hypothetical in a feasible way. Asking more like, "What would the project do with $1k?" Hopefully publication of the lessons will be occuring soon, and that will take quite a bit of an investment to get done. Lojbab still hasn't finished recouping the costs of publishing the reference grammar, and publishing the lessons would surely be not too cheap, either. - Jay Kominek