[TAG] found something in the attic...

[Peter Knaggs]

On 1/7/06, Benjamin A. Okopnik <ben at linuxgazette.net> wrote:

> [wry look] What we need is a bit of expertise from some marketing genius.
> Anybody here know Donald Trump personally?

Well, but there's a difference between
advertising and marketing. I tend to
think of marketing as what folks like Bart
Decrem did for the Firefox project.
What "the Donald" does is for the most part
only institutional advertising.
Still, even after seeing how Bart triggered
the "Spread Firefox" campaign, it's going to
be hard to emulate, never mind repeat, those
kinds of successes. Not without a "knack" for
the basic principles, at least.


> Besides, as I've said before - how would
> you tell a GUI to show the 10 largest files
> in the current directory, including subdirs?

Yep, that's just the sort of thing users
of new-fangled enterprise GUI collaboration
tools run into (let's not single out any
particular company's product here :) eheh).

The users hit their quota limit
on server storage, then find that there's
no way in the GUI to even sort files by size,
never mind do the equivalent of "du -s".
So the users end up making endless requests
to increase their quota...

> Actually, I believe that there's plenty of space for both, GUIs for
> those who want them, and CLI apps for the rest of us.

The "unison" tool is a nice example, where
it has both a GUI and a command line.
The GUI makes it really easy for beginners
to get going with it.


> I like the idea of articles at all levels, from the very basic to
> relatively complex, of interest not only to newbies but to professionals
> as well. I want LG to appeal to a broad audience.


I was wondering if part of the reason for less
participation in the LG mailing list itself
was due to it being written in a way that
would tend to make it less google-icious i.e.
it's more of a free flowing discussion. But
I guess it's just because the TAG list
archives aren't public so google doesn't
index them.

The resulting articles, on the other
hand, do end up with very high google
rankings, like "Recursive-resolver nameserver"
immediately finds Rick's LG #121 article,
and I noticed a search for
"digital television linux" now shows
LG #118 within the top three hits :)

So I guess the puzzle becomes how to get
folks, who aren't necessarily trying to
become authors, to participate in a list
where we first figure out answers, then try
to set a discussion frame with the end
goal being not only to provide the solution
but also to create a readable article about
the topic. Tricky :)

Peter.