Comments on: social media guide for free software projects

By: Lydia

Lydia — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 14:35:15 +0000

@Fabian thanks I’ll think about putting it into a wiki. You’re the second person to suggest it. Since I am not too big on wiki’s myself I started it as PDF also to make offline reading and so on easier. Let’s see what I can do.

By: Fabian Rodriguez

Fabian Rodriguez — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 14:32:29 +0000

Thanks for a nice guide, Lydia, no doubt social media can’t be avoided by free software projects nowadays. I’d suggest the next version is uploaded to a wiki for collaborative editing and improvement, maybe http://howto.wired.com or Ubuntu’s wiki.

By: Lydia

Lydia — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:59:15 +0000

@maniacmusician Thanks a lot
You make a very valid point about the energy it takes. I’ll think about how to integrate that in the next version of the guide.

By: maniacmusician

maniacmusician — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:51:44 +0000

Really well done, I enjoyed it. Kudos on the simple, yet pretty document graphics — a lot of people try to go overboard designing that, and end up with something that looks like a cross between the horror of 90s HTML-web and the GIMP puking into a PDF.

Free software is definitely weak when it comes to acknowledging and interacting with social media. I think the biggest problem is the sheer amount of energy it sometimes takes to maintain a social presence within various online networks, especially when their communities don’t overlap much — you can end up feeling halfway-schizophrenic trying to keep up while remaining interesting and approachable. I think your guide will help with that, even if by just providing contexts in which a certain medium is best used (as you did with microblogging).

That’s a big reason why after the initial boom of MySpace, I’ve abstained from most social networks (except a few that are dear to me, like last.fm). Well, that and privacy issues. But if it got to be a hassle for me as an individual in such a short time, I can only imagine the hell someone must have to go through to increase awareness for their project and build communities around it.

Anyways, thanks! I know a few people who could definitely make good use of this.

~mm

By: Lydia

Lydia — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 20:31:51 +0000

@eean thanks yes it has become harder to get on digg’s frontpage. But that affects every story you want to get there. Not just free software related stories or technology stories. OTOH every KDE release made frontpage lately afaik. (Thanks to some good networking for example.) It’s all about how you go about it

By: Ian Monroe

Ian Monroe — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 20:14:44 +0000

Good guide.

Haven’t we more or less given up on Digg? I agree its good to get on Digg frontpage if we can, especially if want to reach the Firefox-using Windows user, but it seems to be nearly impossible recently.

By: Lydia

Lydia — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 13:33:41 +0000

@Bernd I know about the black swan theory Thanks for your comment.

@Audunmb I know the alternatives. The point is to keep the list people should concentrate on small for maximum impact. Unfortunately nothing beats Flickr and YouTube there. Flickr let’s you license under CC just fine. I’m not sure about YouTube.

By: audunmb

audunmb — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 13:26:44 +0000

Looks good.

You should include alternatives to YouTube and Flickr (do some research, I know there are alternatives but I don’t know much about them), and add something about Creative Commons-options on mediasharing sites.

By: bernd

bernd — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 13:20:12 +0000

Hi Lydia

A good paper I totally agree with it, but always remember you can not control the mass on the internet. You should read about the black swan theory, I think you’ll enjoy it.

ps: a small typo: del.icio.us is now delicious.com

cheers bernd

By: Lydia

Lydia — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 09:48:14 +0000

@Mamarok I don’t actually think digg is that malicious. And even if: every free software story we get up there gets read by _a lot_ of people, making them more aware of free software alternatives.