Subject: Re: [lojban] Marketing lojban

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2001 17:19:20 -0500

At 12:35 PM 03/22/2001 -0700, Jay Kominek wrote:
>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 [email-masked], sucker
>anybody you can into being put onto the list of people who receive email
>sent to that address.

email queries to me, I can handle, just as quickly as I am handling this 
response to you. snail mail is a lot harder, since I have trouble getting 
around to the whole process of pen-to-paper (or 
computer-keyboard-to-envelope, if you prefer). It is the snail mail 
queries we aren't handling. Net-based queries - our ISP was even able to 
handle the massive number of queries from being slash-dotted, or whatever 
it was called, a couple years ago. But while massive amounts were 
downloaded, and Lojban List grew somewhat, that did not turn into more 
personal queries, nor into more sales. We've had more book orders in the 
last month than in any month since shortly after the book was published.

The problem with any sort of advertising that generates orders, especially 
if they are not orders for the one product (the book) that we are able to 
relatively easily prepare and ship from stock in hand, is in my time to 
fill the orders.

>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.

The problem is how to feed snail mail inquiries into such a list.

> > 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?)

Yes it is elaboration, or at least an attempt at same. But "stuff" need 
not be limited to what I have in mind.

> > 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. :/

Yep.

>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.

I think the Lojban community has a lot of dedicated people, but I have to 
admit that such drooling has seldom turned into concerted action when we 
actually start trying to implement something. "concerted" being a key word 
here - sometimes there is some random action which moves things slightly in 
the right direction, and sometimes there are multiple people doing 
contradictory things, but seldom are such efforts sustained.

This is less true for ideas that people come up with on their own, like 
jbofi'e and Sklyanin's Russian site. No coordination, just one person 
working on their own as their time permits, slugging it out for a year or 
more with occasional input from others.

>Surely you need direction for when you do get a burst of human and fiscal 
>resources.

If I had reasonable hope of either, I would probably work harder at 
it. But the particulars of the direction I would go would almost certainly 
have to be tailored to the nature of the human and fiscal 
resources. Unrestricted offers aren't very numerous or large these days.

> > 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?

It's there. Question 18 on projects. (Anyone who wants to write an update 
or addition to this list of projects is welcome to submit same to me, since 
I need to update it.)

> > 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?

I've done this several times. I need to dig in the archives to see if I 
can find what I've written without having to recreate it.

> > 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,

I don't know how to do that, since I think indexed FTP sites are the ideal 
for what I look for when I browse.

>and then added something regularly (however simple,
>mention the latest philosophical discussion on the mailing list)

"Regular" is precisely what we don't have. If someone volunteered to write 
something regularly, then maybe I could make sure it is put in the site (or 
have xod put it on his site and I would add a link to it).

>the web
>page would feel a lot more alive and people would be more motivated to
>look at it. (Oh, and date stuff better,

Explain, please?

>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.)

That which is out of date is marked as such, usually by putting it in the 
"historical" section. If something has a date that is 10 years old, that 
is because it hasn't changed in 10 years.

>I suspect it sounds like I'm being very pushy.

Not in the least. You'll have to do much worse before I get offended %^)

>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.

I'll see what I can come up with. But the one other provision these days 
is that you have to volunteer without presuming that there will be active 
management of your efforts, or coordination with those of other volunteers 
(should they happen to surface). Lojban Central is stretched too thin to 
do much more than collect results. When the results in an area accumulate 
to the point we can call it a product, THEN priority will jump.

>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.)

Post a URL. xod will be interested, at the very least.

>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.

Those of us in the Windoze world don't know what to do with TeX and its 
relatives. The master of the draft textbook is in Microsoft Word, which is 
on the website.

>(I was also correcting errors and bringing it up to date) Would it be 
>worthwhile to
>finish, or is it too out of date?

What do you mean by "out of date"? There is no newer version, nor is 
anyone working on one.

If you complete such a thing, we could add it to the Web site. Whether 
anyone wants such a thing, I can't say. The textbook has minor errors, but 
its primary flaws are incompleteness and an aborted concept of Lojban 
pedagogy. The incompleteness is partly in lack of coverage of the whole 
language, but much more severe in its lack of copious examples, exercises 
and practice readings and writings of the sort that language education 
requires. I learned what I was doing wrong in the textbook when I started 
self-teaching Russian, and simply haven't had the time to start over again 
(though lesson 1 is much more along the lines of what I envision than the 
rest).

>Is there some LLI-internal version thats up to date?

The Word version on the web site is identical to my version. It hasn't 
been touched since Cowan reassembled the original 6 lessons plus my new 
attempt at a lesson 1 into 22 back in 1993.

>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.)

The version on the lojban.org is the latest version. Go for it.

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
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