Slashdot Mirror
Advice for Websites Combating Net.Obscurity?
waveclaw asks: "A Catch-22: how to initially draw people to a community when the a community itself is the selling point and your being drowned in information sea that the web has become? Many people take the popularity of Slashdot and other 'people concentrators' for granted. Whole communities are developing, as they have done for thousands of years, on web logs and news sites via reader feedback. Unfortunately, not all sites are well traveled. (Side note: a lot of reseach has apperantly gone into this.) For instance, the special interst publication Dragon Spirit Magazine is closing their doors due to a lack rather than surfiet of viewers. Belfy Comics lists an entire section of online-only comics which are (for lack of a better term) abandoned by both viewer and creator.
Porbably the most powerful force obliterating free communication is neither fundamentalist nor jack-booted: it's obscurity."
"While network outages are easy to diagnose by comparison, what does a site do when it's dying? Sites like Keenspace and Webring and wiki try to build self-referential collections of sites and pages that sometimes work and sometimes don't Has anyone out had their back to this wall a lot and come out winning? Short of a listing on Slashdot, how?"
Why don't people visit my website?
Why don't people want to help code my open source project?
Why don't people want to help test my program?
Why don't people go all ga ga over what I'm excited about?
Why doesn't want to go on a date with me?
If it's traffic that you want, try submitting a fairly inane "ask slashdot" question, and make sure to include plenty of links to the sites that you're trying to promote. For good measure, try throwing in a link to a Wired article.
What's this? It seems you've beaten me to the punch.
Seriously, though...can anyone else see that this is a fairly desperate attempt at driving traffic to two VERY obscure websites?
No thanks, I'm not _that_ desperate :)
Wow! Mono is still going? God that takes me back a few years, its got to seven or eight years since I last logged in...wonder if my account is still active!?
Al.The Daily ACK - Eclectic posts by yet another hacker
Polls with CowboyNeal as an option.
Way back in the days of 2400 baud modems I had a lil research project for online VR sex. My girlfriend at the time was going to school halfway across the country which as every geek knows leads to lots of online flirting. Both of us being geeks we were developing a pair of suits that would stimulate each user according to what the other was doing. It couldn't handle live images/sound but it could playback canned samples to fit the situation as best as possible and certain lil toys would be stimilated in the suits depending on your actions together. I've sometimes wondered if something like that would sell. It's not the real thing but it's better than most toys. ;)
One of my current projects is a combination of Google's image search and Slashdot's community. Allowing images to be searched, user moderated, discussed, put in albums, etc. If I had a financial backer I'm sure I could turn it into something very cool but there is just no way I can afford a server with the needed bandwidth and harddrive space to make the site into a real business.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
DrugeReport? I assume you mean DrudgeReport, in which case I understand why you didn't list "accuracy" among your reasons for revisiting.
No worse, you'd have to dig bak seven years to remember your password :-)
I should say 'physical beauty' instead of perfection, since really non-biodegradable body parts don't constitute perfection. I kinda went off on a tangent, huh...
PS: wtf is this doing in the "censorship" category? Someone's failure to be an effective marketer/hype generator is not censorship.