PR Team Follow Up

Dear Squeakers,

I'm writing this to follow up our recent effort to get Squeak By Example
Slashdotted. Unless somebody has evidence to the contrary, I think our
effort to get Slashdotted is -- for now -- at an end. I made the PR Team
request on Wednesday. At least five people did submit the story to Slashdot.
The status of my submission was 'pending' for two days, until Friday. Then
it was rejected. I'm assuming that the others have also been rejected.

My impression of this is that the editors did not know what to do with the
story and so left it in the Firehose section to see what kind of reaction
the story had on the Slashdot forums. There was not a great deal of forum
activity for the story, and so I think they took that as an indication that
they could pass the story over.

That's OK. One Slashdoting does not a new future for Squeak make. What I
think is most important here is how positive and willing the Squeak
community was to take this idea seriously. Nobody thought trying to get
Slashdotted was a waste of time. It is my impression that people in the
Squeak community are ready for a higher profile. If the community starts to
think in this way, and this is something that Squeakers want, then we can
make it happen over time.

Chris Cunnington
PR Team leader

I don't know how Slashdot works.  Is it possible that the stories were
rejected because basically the same thing came up 5 times in rapid
succession, or is that an ok thing to do?

On 9/30/07, CHRIS CUNNINGTON <[hidden email]> wrote:

>>>>> "CHRIS" == CHRIS CUNNINGTON <[hidden email]> writes:

CHRIS> My impression of this is that the editors did not know what to do with
CHRIS> the story and so left it in the Firehose section to see what kind of
CHRIS> reaction the story had on the Slashdot forums. There was not a great
CHRIS> deal of forum activity for the story, and so I think they took that as
CHRIS> an indication that they could pass the story over.

I wouldn't worry so much about the slashdot crowd.  They're mostly in an echo
chamber these days.  What would be interesting is to see how Digg'ed you can
get for this story.  The Cool Kids are reading Digg (and Reddit too, but to a
lesser extent).

--
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<[hidden email]> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
Perl/Unix/security consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
See PerlTraining.Stonehenge.com for onsite and open-enrollment Perl training!

Hi all,

FWIW I've tried submitting Weekly Squeak articles to Slashdot a number of
times without success.  Other times articles topics I wrote about but didn't
submit got accepted after being submitted by others, (OLPC related).  I
regularly submit to reddit, and that has worked well.  I just signed up for
digg to help a story someone suggested needed digging but find I don't have
much time to go through many aggregators.  (I'm not even really sure how
digg works, but I like reddit)

If I don't get down voted on reddit it usually brings in 3-4 hundred hits,
and for really good or interesting articles it can easily bring in >5
hundred.  Once reddit pushes us into the top blogs on wordpress, we usually
get a few hundred more hits.  

There are definitely a group of Smalltalk skeptics.  It seems odd to me that
the most hostile Smalltalk critics are Haskell and Lisp programmers.  Seems
odd, like yelling at your own family!  I certainly don't have anything
against Haskell or Lisp, so I usually do not respond.
 
Thank you again to our new Weekly Squeak contributors, Michael Davies and
Brad Fuller.  The new articles were responsible for increasing our hits for
Sept to 14,474 (from around 10K in July and August).  The articles are
really great, thank you!

We had a total of 9 articles posted in September.

Our best day was 1398 hits.

Our top article was:
http://news.squeak.org/2007/09/21/qwaq-intel-collaborate-on-enhanced-virtual
-workspace-product/  which had 1500 hits.

If you would like to volunteer to help the Weekly Squeak please let me know.
This is a great way to help your Squeak community.  

Thanks,

Ron Teitelbaum
Squeak News Team Leader

> I wouldn't worry so much about the slashdot crowd.  They're mostly in an echo
> chamber these days.

Echo chambers can be useful, if what you want is an echo.

The editors of Slashdot are still influential - not to the cool kids
but for mass exposure.  Being slashdotted still means lots of hits,
and also the chance of being picked up by mainstream media.

Getting attention from the cool kids is another level of black magic
entirely.  I personally find digg and reddit utterly boring, but then
I am neither cool nor a kid.

David