<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 27 April 2010 22:29, Ian Trudel <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ian.trudel@gmail.com">ian.trudel@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Hi Michael,<br>
<br>
You have done very well on <a href="http://news.squeak.org/" target="_blank">http://news.squeak.org/</a> ! </blockquote><div>Thank you!<br> <br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
This thread is<br>
about reaching a broader audience and especially outside Smalltalk<br>
communities.<br>
<br></blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Your premise is clear: one will find great news about Squeak __if they<br>
are interested in Squeak development__. This may exclude other<br>
Smalltalk communities and most likely entirely exclude the rest of the<br>
world.<br>
<br></blockquote><div>I think you have mis-read my post. I mentioned "interest in Squeak development" as being an important quality for the writer, not for the audience. I tried to be clear that "I aim to write the articles so that readers unfamiliar with Squeak can understand what's going on and why it's of interest".<br>
<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Let's bring an hypothesis forth in such effect that most long time<br>
smalltalkers (5, 10, 20 years) use one dialect and stick to it. There<br>
will be very little compelling reasons for them to switch or<br>
contribute to Squeak. They are unlikely to be our target audience.<br></blockquote><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
People who do not know about Smalltalk nor Squeak are unlikely to land<br>
on The Weekly Squeak website. Not even the Squeak webiste. As we say<br>
here, if people don't come to you, go to them. This is where a press<br>
release for the layman (or in the programming world) with screenshots<br>
and so on should come. Something to be sent to news site all around<br>
the globe. Some reporters will take on the story, some will not, but<br>
it's worth the try.<br>
<br>
Summary: We need to raise "product awareness" (Squeak) around the<br>
world before hoping anybody will read The Weekly News or use Squeak.<br>
</blockquote><div><br>I absolutely agree with your summary, but I think it's only very infrequently that press releases will be the most productive way to do so. <br><br>If you want to
promote the use of Squeak, you need to find people with a Squeak-shaped
hole in their lives, help them recognise that the hole exists, convince them that Squeak can fill the hole, and make
filling that hole as enjoyable as possible [note to self, never use
this uncomfortable metaphor again].<br>
<br>To be honest, very little of what happens in Squeak is relevant to a
wide audience. Some audiences can be identified though: some work at the VM level is of interest to computer
scientists, some of the tools like Seaside can interest other developers,
re-licensing discussions always agitate the Free Software community,
but there are very few pieces of work like Etoys, Scratch, DrGeo that
can excite a wider, less technical audience.<br><br>My opinion is that the
audience that is easiest to bring to Squeak is the young enthusiastic
CS students and developers that populate digg, Reddit, Hacker News, Slashdot, Stack
Overflow and a plethora of other sites, and skim-read a hundred different RSS feeds. You don't gain their attention
by issuing a press release, but by posting something "cool" that will
get re-posted, linked and tweeted, and cause a horde of readers to visit your site. Admittedly most of them will
go "huh", and carry on trying to finish reading the internet (though
hopefully with a slightly better opinion of Squeak and Smalltalk), but
maybe if they're bored and it's made a no-brainer process they'll download
Squeak, and learn a bit more about it.<br><br>The new UI work and the increasing use of "one-click images" get rid of two of the obstacles that have put many of these casual browsers off trying Squeak; the ongoing work on in-image documentation will make it easier for them to work out what the hell they've just downloaded.<br>
<br>So, the missing piece is to attract this audience to Squeak in the first place - my advice would be "write blog posts". If you've applied an obscure algorithm to allow you to cut 10% off file access times, write a blog post explaining how you arrived at it; if there's a debate about how to implement system-wide menus, write a post describing the alternative approaches; if you've written a great Fizz-Buzz one-liner, blog about it; if you've written a Seaside application that uses the Flickr API to generate an HTML-5 crowd-sourced lolcat mashup, blog about it and watch your server collapse under the load.<br>
<br>And then tweet about it <a href="https://twitter.com/#search?q=%23squeak">https://twitter.com/#search?q=%23squeak</a> so we can all contribute information and correct misunderstandings in the discussions when it gets picked up on the main sites.<br>
<br>I need to go and lie down now, I've had a rush of Web 2.0 blood to the head.<br><br></div><font color="#888888">
</font></div>Michael<br>