Robin Lee Powell wrote:
On Tue, Sep 12, 2006 at 01:12:04PM -0300, Jorge Llamb?as wrote:On 9/12/06, Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:However, I don't think it really crosses the line to bad publicity."There's no such thing as bad publicity." :)I've never really believed that, actually. I wonder if any actual studies have been done.
I think for Lojban, it would be difficult to have "bad publicity".It would be especially difficult to imagine bad publicity for us associated with a front page story on the Wall St Journal (there are negative stories that appear there, but it is hard to imagine Lojban being connected to such a story in a negative way - even the LLG Board going to prison for bilking Donald Trump out of megabucks would have people trying to figure out what we had to offer that would tempt the Donald %^).
Even with the word "cult" used in the article, it lends us gravitas that is almost unattainable for an artificial language. (I suspect that the word was used metaphorically to mean "having weird ideas").
Most likely, it will lead a small number of people who had never heard of us to use their search engines (the reporter who interviewed me had never heard of us before working on the story; nor had she heard of Klingon as a real language, for that matter, and they are much more widely known).
The article also gives gravitas to Hartmut's efforts, which seemed to many to be completely quixotic until this recent success, which in turn means that he will attract more attention, which means that more people will look at us on that basis.
And anyone who looks at us will have trouble seeing anything cultlike about us %^)
lojbab