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slashdot.org gives Lojban a push

I just found out that Lojban was merely mentioned in a topic of discussion on slashdot.org a few days ago. The result has been a phenomonal set of hits (not to mention a discussion thread that was around 400K of download, though relatively little of that was about Lojban).
If there is anyone amongst the Lojban-knowledgeable who have a membership in slashdot.org and the stamina to comment and respond to queries, it would be appreciated. There has already been a couple of statements suggesting that people think that Lojban has more limited emotional expressivity than a natural language (something I think is the opposite of reality).
The following, where I respond to Don Harlow, who told me about it, gives the URL and the stunning hit numbers. If any significant percentage of these turns to Lojban List subscriptions or book orders, we will shortly be drowning in new people. 

If any of you reading this are among these newcomers, welcome!

lojbab
Bob LeChevalier, President, Logical Language Group, Inc.
============================================================================ ==== 


From:    "Donald J. HARLOW" <don@DONH.VIP.BEST.COM>
Subject: Slashdotted?

This is particularly for Bob LeCHEVALIER, Robin TURNER, and the various
Esperanto speakers floating around in this group. Check out an interesting
question raised at

http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/00/04/25/1317255.shtml

According to the statistics provided by the administrator of the Free
Esperanto Course (version for English speakers), this posting has led to an
increase in the number of signups for that course on the order of 150-200
for the month of April. I was just wondering if the folks at Lojban Central
had seen a similar effect on anything they measure. I would guess that this
ought to be the case...


[sound of jaw crashing through floor]
I almost blew by this, since I did not have time to look at Web pages tonight. But I looked at the site, and then I looked at our Web page statistics. Then came the sound just mentioned.
On April 29-30 some 7500 different sites looked at our Web pages, with a total downloaded bandwidth of over 1 gig. This is about what we have been getting in a year. And it is presumably going to continue today.
It does not seem to have had much impact on our site until the 29th, and there is a lot of stuff there to look at, so it is probably premature to be seeing a lot of follow on signups for Lojban List or book orders or whatever. But I'll let you know, assuming I can refasten my jaw.
Oh, kinda interesting is that the hits on the 29th came from 63 different country domains, including such places as Christmas Island and Niue.
I am not sure I ever heard of slashdot.org before this. But obviously a lot of people read it seriously. 

----
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                    703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:  http://www.lojban.org (newly updated!)