As others see us...
7 April 2004, 10:35 AM
I'm finding it interesting to see what people on various sites are saying when they link to the Linux-on-a-dead-badger article. A couple times now, I've seen people refer to Strange Horizons as a collection of strange stuff, or as an odd site. It seems pretty clear to me, both from looking at the table of contents and from clicking the "about us" link, that it's a weekly magazine-like site; the structure and concept seem very straightforward to me. But I suppose if you show up to read about dead badgers, you may be predisposed to look for oddness—and I suppose if you don't normally read science fiction or fantasy, it may not be obvious (without reading the About page) what our focus is.
At any rate, regardless of what they say, I'm immensely pleased at the broad distribution. All sorts of sites are linking to us. Clearly we oughtta run geek-humor articles more often.
Comments
Is the linked version to the frameset or not? Because if not, I can imagine people coming in without being able to get fuck-all of a sense of what's going on.
Posted by: Susan (mail) | April 7, 2004 5:04 PM
Yup—in every case I've seen, the link is to the framed version of the article.
Best comment so far: "How the hell do you find a website like that?!?! I'm just trying to think of the Google that would result in THAT!"
Posted by: Jed | April 7, 2004 5:15 PM
I tried "dead badger" and Linux (without the "and" but with the quotes), and strangely it came up first on the list ... strikingly, out of 4,010 hits. So it's clearly not the only how-to about installing Linux on dead badgers, but just as clearly it is the most popular.
Posted by: Luc (mail) (web) | April 7, 2004 8:04 PM
Well, that little experiment seemed to have worked out pretty well :-) I even find the flaming amusing.
Posted by: Lucy (web) | April 7, 2004 8:31 PM
I forgot to say: thanks for the article, Lucy!
Luc: The vast majority of Google's hits for this are sites that reprint Slashdot pieces (presumably using Slashdot's RSS feed), so they'll all pages that link to use. The few that aren't linking to us are related to Lucy's original version of this article, published at everything2 back in January.
Posted by: Jed | April 8, 2004 12:49 AM
There's flaming? Sheesh. Gotta go see what they say...
Posted by: nalo (mail) | April 8, 2004 9:35 AM
Most of the flaming is on Slashdot, where they'll complain about anything. (About half the complaints seem to be of the form "It's not April Fool's Day!"; the other half either don't get that it's a humor piece or don't find it funny.) But most of the comments I've seen, especially in places other than Slashdot, have been positive.
Posted by: Jed | April 8, 2004 11:01 AM
I now know how to say "dead badger" in Portuguese ("texugo morto"), thanks to a Brazilian site.
Posted by: Jed | April 8, 2004 12:35 PM