On Tue, Jun 03, 2003, Shachar Shemesh wrote about "Re: SCO SCO SCO (or whatever)":
> Creating awarness with those journalists take time. We sent one press
> release about Haifux already. I missed the HSpell announcement.
Since Hspell became a favorite example here, I think I better comment on it.
But keep in mind that Hspell has *NOTHING* to do with Hamakor, and our
decisions regarding it are completely separate from Hamakor's board's
decisions regarding their activities.
Every time we (Dan Kenigsberg and I) release a new version of Hspell,
I send an announcement to exactly three places:
1. linux-il (this list)
2. ivrix-discuss (which unlike this list, isn't drowned with offtopic
discussions like this one).
3. freshmeat.net
I send it to these sources because, frankly, these are *my* favorite
sources of information. I don't send further announcements to ynet,
globes, hamakor, whatsup, penguin, slashdot, debian, tapuz, or one of the
dozen other forums which might be interested in this announcements,
which doesn't mean that all those projects and others aren't worthy
and wonderful sources of information, perhaps even better than the three
that I chose and perhaps with a larger crowd.
I realize that it would be more convenient to Whatsup if I send them
an announcement in Hebrew, to debian if I send them a tested .deb, and
so on, but unfortunately my time is limited. Next time, I promise I'll
think about announcing on Whatsup too. But in the meantime, if people find
Hspell valuable enough (and fortunately, they seem to do) they will come
forward and do those things themselves - like an Hspell announcement appeared
on whatsup even if I didn't write it, or .deb packages appeared (thanks to
Baruch Even) even though we didn't know anything about how to create them.
Anyway, keep in mind that Hspell is a technical project, not a PR fad;
For Hspell to succeed, it is frankly more important for it to have technical
merit (good programming, good linguistic data) than good PR. When competing
against a void (i.e., the zero other free Hebrew spell-checkers), good PR
isn't a deciding factor - though it certainly never hurts. Getting Hspell
coverage in websites and newspapers is flattering, but is not our goal:
our goal is to make hspell high-quality enough, and get it into popular
distributions; If Hspell was installed with Redhat, for example, we wouldn't
need any PR for new Hspell versions, just like 99.9% of the "ls" users
never read announcements of new versions of it.
--
Nadav Har'El | Wednesday, Jun 4 2003, 4 Sivan 5763
[EMAIL PROTECTED] |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Entropy: Not just a fad, it's the future!
http://nadav.harel.org.il |
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