Subject: Re: [lojban] Marketing lojban

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2001 12:10:49 -0500

At 11:19 AM 03/25/2001 -0700, Jay Kominek wrote:
>On Thu, 22 Mar 2001, Bob LeChevalier (lojbab) wrote:
> > 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.
>
>Wouldn't, then, it save a lot of effort to not make it appear as though
>you're selling anything besides the book? Like, the brochure from 1991,
>is still pretty easy to find and it lists all kinds of stuff for sale that
>isn't the book.

It is all still technically for sale, but we get very few orders and make 
no profit on the other stuff. A revision will be made when we get the 
level 0 book done which will greatly reduce the order form. I don't have 
time to redo the order form until then.

> > >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.
>
>I suppose the effort to scan them would be comparable to responding.

I now have a scanner, but probably yes. Might work as a longer term solution.

>Hm, maybe bundle mail up as you get it and then mail it off to somebody
>who claims to have enough time to respond to inquiries?

Volunteers who have actually followed through on an offer in a timely 
manner have been a rare and inconsistent thing. I wish it were otherwise, 
but these days I have to see someone produce results before I accept the 
meaningfulness of a volunteer offer enough to actually do something 
differently myself.

> > >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?
>
>The motivating? Or the dating? The motivating is just an observation I've
>made. Pages which have things change on them get visited a lot, even if
>there aren't changes for awhile. As far as the dating, I just find it
>difficult to figure out which documents are the right versions of things.
>(In how many places is the gismu list linked to?)

As far as I know, unless it is in the history directory, it is the same 
gismu list linked to everywhere. It in a document with a 1994 official 
date, though the file date may be somewhat later because I made some 
non-substantive corrections in my off-line master that did not warrant a 
date change and used the new version when I updated the web site last year.

> > >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.
>
>Well, there are for instance, a couple of lujvo files floating around, I
>think. NORALUJ.TXT? and just lujvo and something else. Which one is the
>one people are supposed to get? All? Do they duplicate each other? I don't
>really see any dates on them so I don't know which one is the most recent.

I should probably clarify that. They are indeed all duplicative (they all 
have the same words) but the formats differ based on the intended uses and 
some have more information.

> > 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.
>
>Ask your friendly *NIX running neighbor to run it through pdflatex to
>produce a nice PDF? :) (Or postscript, or HTML, or things appropriate for
>sending to a publisher.)

I have PDF capability from Adobe, using Word to output Postscript. Came 
with Pagemaker.

> > >(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.
>
>Well, has the language (vocabulary or grammar) changed since the textbook
>was written?

Yes, but changes are minor since Cowan's '94 revision. More significant 
has been changes in the way we think about the language that have come from 
usage, that would significantly change 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.
>
>All sounds fixable with a bit of help.

We need all the help we can get. But forgive me when I say that I will see 
results before I believe.

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