[LAU] An appeal to famous artists?

Alexandre Prokoudine alexandre.prokoudine at gmail.com
Fri Aug 5 00:43:07 UTC 2011


On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 11:39 PM, Aurélien Leblond wrote:

> 2. More interrestingly, the "appeal to famous artists" didn't seem to
> be well received... What seems to come out though is that although the
> FOSS community seems to be good to produce software, we don't seem to
> be good at advertising it :)
> - Ardour has...49 followers on facebook... Nothing on the wall...
> - Hydrogen...94...and one entry on the wall...
> - Couldn't find a # tag for any of these on Twitter...
>
> I know I know, we are not advertisers, we are developers!
> But what if a small group of us (and yeah, including me :)) would do that?
>
> How do we go about that? We have loads of website/tools to share code
> and software (sourceforge, svn, git, etc..), but none to organise
> ourself into a community to create some kind of organised campagn of
> advertisement on social networks (or other tools)!

Again, no book of recipes here.

You got it right that people tend to listen to authorities (for good
and bad reasons), but how about turning yourself into one? This is a
hard way to go. The good news is that it might not take dozens of
years to happen.

People are attracted by knowledge. Do you hang around in communities
of DAW users who are on Mac and Windows? Do you know useful tricks
that work across platforms? Like using compressors right for
particular tasks? You can share what you know without unloading Linux
propaganda on people, but if you keep giving useful hints that work
and you consistently use recognizable screenshots with Ardour or
whatever it is you use, eventually you become authority who is known
to make a good use of Linux.

Have a look at http://audio.tutsplus.com/. They have loads of
tutorials where authors say something like "I used X app with Y
plugin, but the general idea works pretty much everywhere". That's the
right approach: people learn something new and they don't feel like
they are being dragged to a particular solution (while in fact they
are :))

This has a lot of social engineering in it.

By the way, I think Create Digital Music is probably the only industry
blog that publishes up to date information on Linux audio/MIDI
software. Few others that do tend to get things wrong or, like
aforementioned audiotuts, re-publish old outdated stuff. Well, there
is a beast called guest blogging. You could try it. Just make sure you
write convincing material.

Alexandre Prokoudine
http://libregraphicsworld.org


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