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 cunnington@sympatico.ca wrote:
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
"CHRIS" == CHRIS CUNNINGTON cunnington@sympatico.ca 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).
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
-----Original Message----- From: Randal L. Schwartz
"CHRIS" == CHRIS CUNNINGTON cunnington@sympatico.ca 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
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
squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org
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Ron Teitelbaum