What Richard said. I really don't know why we need a magazine. I have never heard of a push for one. Secondly, when we do something like Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, it does feel like we are pulling teeth to get some articles. Please don't get me wrong, I think we could do more marketing and pushing articles but three or four people hacking on UWN in one day isn't going to get the job done as well as it could be done. Now, like Richard, I would support any project as long as I feel it is justified. I hesitate to say I agree as I am hesitant that our Marketing efforts become too spread out.
On 4/2/07, Rich Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Monday 02 April 2007, Adam wrote: [snip] | For scope: | I believe that our scope should be wide, but we should deliberately avoid | rehashing news from the UWN, unless it is a big big deal. By "big deal" I | mean Novell-Microsoft, GPL v3, you get the idea. Other things I think we | should include are interesting HOW-TO's that show people how to use often | ignored software in the repos better their experience with Ubuntu. We | should include editorials, thought provoking articles, etc. We want the | content to be interesting to the target audience (see below). I believe we | should also include a "Behind Ubuntu Linux" section. News is of course UWN and the Fridge. The Behind Ubuntu crew needs to start working again, or hand over the reins. I was one of the originators/helpers of the first "Magazine" topic last year. Seeing as the Fridge is going to be rehashed shortly, I don't know how the Magazine will fit in. I still prefer the Fridge for news and as soon as it gets rehashed and story content can be provided by the community through editors, the Magazine scope will be hard to justify I believe. We do need a 1-stop-shop for Ubuntu news truthfully, and combining the efforts of the UWN, Behind Ubuntu, the Fridge, and possibly the magazine into one centralized location, with a name better than the Fridge (even though the name started as somewhat of a joke or a play on words). It seems that branding has come to the forefront recently with Canonical and Ubuntu in general, so maybe this needs to be looked at as well. I don't mean to burst a bubble or anything, but if you can justify the magazine, then I am all for it. Just don't try to justify it by saying the Fridge and Behind Ubuntu series are stale, or that the UWN isn't read by many or is developer oriented. To me that doesn't justify the magazine, but justifies the fact we need to improve, or combine and improve the efforts that already hold a footprint in the community. | Target Audience: | I believe for our target audience we should be going after the new Ubuntu | user. These people are in general new to free-software, and Linux, and are | typically very enthusiastic about it. We should be targeting the less | technically able users of Ubuntu as they are the current widest audience | (and still a growing demographic in the Ubuntu community). That's just my | opinion on the matter. Target Audience should be everyone I think. Once you have a newcomer hooked, you need to keep them. So a couple of months down the road, when they aren't so new anymore, you don't want to exclude them. | Required members: | The more the merrier but I know we will definitely need someone well versed | in English (are we going to be translating this?) to edit and proof-read | the articles. We will need someone to do the artwork to create a basic | page layout for each article etc. (So we'll need some good publishing | software too, I imagine). We'll need actual writers who are at least | competant in English enough to get their point across, we'll want skilled | writers for any editorials who can write their opinions in a convincing | manner. For content we need however many people we can get to go out there | and do interviews, get how-tos from the community, etc. I think we could | do this with 10 dedicated members but if this is going to suffer the lack | of interest that the last attempts saw then we'll need a lot more bodies | involved. It is going to be hard to maintain a list of members, since the turnover rate is pretty high in the community. In the couple of years I have been around, I have seen so many leave, and only a few have stuck it out. We need to find a way to offer a project that is somewhat rewarding to keep members active and happy as well. We aren't running a sweat shop around here :) | distribution: | I feel that .pdf is the appropriate way to distribute at the moment. It's | the gold standard for E-mags. PDF is fine, however take to consideration how you will create such PDFs. You want them to be read and look the same no matter the viewer. Scribus and Inkscape seem to offer fairly decent PDF exports that can be read by almost all viewers (evince is the big one that seems to have issues). | Release: | Monthly is good as far as I'm concerned. Monthly, quarterly, yearly, every 25 years... OK, monthly is good, especially if you are going to do translations. You will need a solid 2.5 to 3 weeks of creation work in English allowing at least a week for translations. However, don't plan on using Rosetta for translations, as you will need manual translations which could be done by the LoCo teams, or by firing an email to the translators email list. They need time, so far the quickest turnaround I seen from manual translations is 1 week with a new Firefox Startpage for Kubuntu docs. | Content quantity: | I think we should avoid overwhelming ourselves so the early magizine issues | should be relatively short. This will let us build up a stock of content | to use in future issues so we can keep things going without pressuring | ourselves too greately. Quantity should be the last thing on the plate, quality is definitely #1. With quality will eventually come the quantity. You don't want to plan for say 6 stories, 2 how-to's, 1 interview, and this or that. It is tough to get solid news stories that isn't printed everywhere else. Like the Fridge, there isn't a lot of original content, it really aggregates news from other sources, and I can't stand that. If you are to provide news, it should at least be original, or at least damn close to original. People are getting tired of reading the same news from 100 different sources, and adding 1 more isn't going to do nothing but add fuel to the fire. | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | It is worth noting that there are already specs started for this from | previous attempts and we should leverage that: Truthfully, I don't think this needs to be spec'd unless there is enough justification from it, and a solid support from Canonical to release news statements to us prior to Linux.com, LXer and what not. It seems Canonical PR goes to outside sources way before it does the community. I have heard this is going to change. For a year now at least. | I hope we can get this off the ground, let's succeed where past attempts | have failed. I would love to see something strong come out of this team, or the community in general. Let me chew my cabbage one more time and say it just needs justification and using the lack of solid content at the Fridge and Behind Ubuntu doesn't do it for me nor some others either possibly. The reason the last attempt failed, no justification. Everyone tried to jump in head first with justifying anything. I saw this from the beginning as did Jenda and Corey and possibly Joey as well. I don't want to see a great idea go to waste again because of this. Hey, I love the fact people are motivated to create projects for marketing as it needs to be done big time. It is easy for us to get someone to check us out, but it is difficult for us to make them stay. This isn't just an issue with our community, but all other communities as well. Branding is huge, at least here in the US. People use Windows, Mac OS, iPods, drink Coke, wear Levi's, and drive Chevrolets, why? Because they were raised or lived in the era that did nothing but constantly instill these brands and images into their(our) heads. It is obvious the drive is here, however I don't see the direction and that is not our fault. Marketing is a complex machine, it has a driving force, but it doesn't have Mapquest to show it the route. driving force == Ubuntu Marketing Team Mapquest == Canonical Marketing/PR -- Rich Johnson [EMAIL PROTECTED] GPG Key: 0x2E2C0124 -- ubuntu-marketing mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-marketing
-- Best, Freddy Martinez Kubuntu. Linux for human beings. www.chi.ubuntu-us.org </message>
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