Re: Age of marketing

[Tom von Schwerdtner <tomvons gmail com>]

On 9/22/05, D Bera <dbera web gmail com> wrote:
> Boy, this is the age of marketing. As if learning from the ingenious
> marketing techniques of Apple and Microsoft, Kat (the KDE desktop
> err... file search tool) is now being hosted on
> http://kat.mandriva.com/ The front page looks professional and
> mentions the "Softpedia 5/5" and "Linux+ recommended"
> awards/distinctions/whatever. Also, are on the page, several
> promo-style comments on the usefulness of kat (none of them deviate
> from the truth, unlike some of the commercials of other software
> giants). This is of course, much less effort than the marketing of
> Apple spotlight, Google GDS.
>
> Just a personal opinion, but beaglewiki.org looks a bit kiddy compared
> to the other efforts. Beagle is certainly equally (or better) utility
> than the others and deserves better promo/marketing :P.

I might be a biased geek web guy but I much prefer the beagle site in
appearance and mostly in content (clean and easy is always better than
busy and hard-to-find-stuff...thats how I see it anyways).

Testimonials would be good though

> Does anybody feel a similar need ? Is there anybody in Novell or
> outside working on highlighting the features, which I feel, include,
> - all of them search files no doubt, but apart from that,
> - application backends, IIRC;
> - network -wide index and remote search
> - system-wide index
> - webinterface for non-gnome users (not yet in Kat and not in spotlight)
> - search for not only files but people, appointments, TODOs, and
> possibly cats and dogs ;)
> - ... (fill in the blanks)

More info on the front page about beagle itself would probably be a
good idea, and I don't think the "using beagle you can easily find"
list is all that clear as to what beagle does.

Maybe even a sort of comic strip or story along the lines of:

1) "now what was I supposed to bring to this conference"
2) *screen closeup, typing 'conference materials' into Best*
3) *best search results showing a tomboy note, a few emails (one
hilighting a line "do not forget to bring xxx to the conference") and
some files/chats/porn/whatever
4) "aha! my job is saved!"

or maybe thats overkill, but the point is it should say more "what you
can DO with beagle" than "what you can SEARCH with beagle".

> Ideally, really good work shouldnt need extensive marketing, but even
> good research results, need to be send to right conferences and
> written correctly to have people appreciate it.

Some random comments on the beagle site:

* The header is too big, it takes up ~40% of the page "above the fold"
on my 1024x768 laptop.
* The [edit] links should IMO be hidden unless you are logged in.  In
general I'd say that if you have to log in to use it, you should only
see it when you are logged in.
* 'Main Page' should IMO be 'Home'.  I know it's a wiki but so does
anyone who would edit it so there is no reason to advertise that or to
use wiki-speak for a site like this.


$0.02 USD

-Tom