I also strongly concur with brian_d_foy's goal of getting more people (including myself ;) publishing well written articles about Perl. I think getting more well-written technical articles, that just happen to use Perl, into general computing periodical is a great, unobtrusive way of advocating Perl and raising it's profile some. And educating the public about some of the things it can do well.
This is probably the single most important thing that "mere individuals" can do to sway the marketplace. The key word above is *general* computing periodicals. The same place where IT managers are hanging out.
Alex Brelsfoard wrote:
What about a website advertising scheme? Make a really neat/interesting/technological website based out of Perl and then see if we could get some companies to advertsie it (such as O'Reilly, Apache, and Google)?
Why make something that already exists?
If Amazon, Yahoo, Ticketmaster, etc. are already using Perl in a big way, then why not put effort into making that more visible?
One way is through a silly button campaign. "Built with Perl", "Powered by Perl", whatever. We've all seen them around for other products. I've even seen them for Perl, though I don't recall there being any standard or effort to encourage them.
If such a thing existed, the next step would be getting the big name users of Perl to put them on their sites. It's better that an IT manager notices that Amazon uses Perl when he is shopping for books, than having a page somewhere on perl.com that lists Amazon among the big names.
Another approach would be to get people from these companies to contribute articles to general IT publications. It's great that some of them show up at Perl conferences, but that's preaching to the converted.
-Tom
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