Subject: Re: [lojban] how can i help lojban? what can $ do?

From: Jay Kominek <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 08:45:39 -0600 (MDT)

On Fri, 20 Jul 2001 [email-masked] wrote:

> i try to start discussions in jbosnu, so we can start using the
> language. so far that's gone pretty well. i don't want to try to
> change the language myself, or i'll end up wanting to write my own!

I for one appreciate your attempts on jbosnu even if I don't get involved
in them.

> i tried giving money to lojbab, but apparently he didn't even cash
> the checks in time. i think the lojban cause is supremely important,
> so where should i send money to help it along to?

I think he is taking money via paypal now, which maybe is more convinent
for him?

> i'm wondering if a lot of money thrown on the problem would make
> things worse or better? i suppose we could get people on things full
> time to develop and evangelize.

You could pay people to learn the language, and then pay them to write
stuff in it.

Thats sort of excessive, though.

I would like to mention that within the last few days I ran an ad on
Google for Lojban. (I spent about $4 total on it, so it was worth it
for an experiment.) The ad read something like:

Lojban
The Logical Language
For unambiguous communication

(I changed the text of it a couple of times to see if something would
start generating a better response.)

270 people viewed it, 2 people clicked on it, for a click-through of 0.74%
which is just slightly below the average click through for an ad on the
Internet, of 1%.

I used keywords like "Loglan", "Interlingua", "Klingon Language",
"Artificial Language", "Constructed Language", and "Predicate Logic".

Interlingua was responsible for one click, Predicate Logic for the other.

I'm not sure how to interpret the results, but hopefully nobody is upset
by this.

(Btw, only two people searched for "loglan" in the couple of days that my
ad was running.)

> what could, for example, a ten million dollar boost do to the project?

I realize you're being hypothetical, but maybe it would be more productive
to be hypothetical in a feasible way. Asking more like, "What would the
project do with $1k?"

Hopefully publication of the lessons will be occuring soon, and that will
take quite a bit of an investment to get done. Lojbab still hasn't
finished recouping the costs of publishing the reference grammar, and
publishing the lessons would surely be not too cheap, either.

- Jay Kominek <[email-masked]>