Subject: [lojban] Re: Loglan google hits.

From: Steven Belknap <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 04:21:51 -0600

On Monday, December 9, 2002, at 06:25 PM, Theodore Reed wrote:

> On Mon, 9 Dec 2002 14:01:46 -0800
> Robin Lee Powell <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
>> So, I don't think that anyone searching on loglan will have to do too
>> much work to find lojban...
>>
>> -Robin
>
> Just like me.
>
> In Robert A Heinlein's "The Number of the Beast", loglan is mentioned 
> in
> the context of programming languages. It sounded familiar, and I 
> thought
> maybe it was a dialect of fortran (heh!), so I hit google to find more
> info about it. I quickly found the loglan web site, and some other
> sites. I also found the lojban site, but at first, it seemed like a
> half-assed remake of loglan (alas, I can't remember the reason for this
> opinion anymore, it may have been the years old "we're working on this
> wordlist/book/etc" notices). So I started learning loglan.
>
> After a week or so, I wondered how big of a community loglan had, and
> could find virtually no online presence beyond the official site. It 
> was
> this fact that lead me back to lojban. I took a longer look at it, and
> then discovered the IRC channel, and a thriving wiki and several sites.
> A community! I kept on with learning lojban instead of loglan, and came
> to realize that it was certainly not a half-assed version of loglan, 
> and
> it had the important advantage of actually having people with whom I
> could converse in it.
>
> So, there you have a large part of why I don't think loglan should be 
> at
> all relevant to lojbanists, except as historical data .

OOH, you were so close! The word Loglan *is* relevant to LLG Loglan 
(which you call lojban) in that a google search should reflect reality. 
Many people will do as you and I did: use a search engine to find out 
about LOGLAN. When they do, they should find LLG Loglan since LLG 
Loglan is a vital language with an active community while TLI Loglan is 
moribund. That fact should be reflected in google searches. Most people 
click on the first hit if it appears to be relevant to their search.