Tisquel Publicity

Yes, obviously that would be ideal judge of popularity. My point however though is if Trisquel was ranked highly on a popular website (such as distrowatch) we might get more publicity. I was suggesting that we could achieve that by simply visiting the page once a day.

We could possibly add a "please tell us why you installed/downloaded
Trisquel!" whenever someone installs the system. Sort of like
registration. Granted, those rarely work; I think that the FOSS
community would do that, though.

On 10/30/2010 02:13 PM, name at domain wrote:
> I think what ninos is trying to say is that the number of Trisquel
> downloads would be a better measure of its popularity than its
> Distrowatch ranking.
>
> Then again, it might be difficult to come up with such a figure, since
> a lot of those downloads probably happen through BitTorrent.

As a riff on Ninos comment, if one goes to Google/more/even more/trends and types into the search box "Linux" you will see an ongoing graph of what I "think" is "the number of times something was searched for".

If you then go to the search bar and enter "RedHat" you will see that the graph of searches for RedHat has trended down.

If you then type in Ubuntu, you will see that it is trending up and then levels off, kind of, with spikes when there are releases.

The big idea here is that the searches for the distros does seem to SOMEwhat indicate how a distro is trending.

So.... the developers could compare the number of downloads over the last "time frame" and if the numbers are going up, or at least trending level, with spikes during releases then things might be going pretty well.

If one types into the search Trisquel one sees a similar graph, it seems to go up and down but is staying relatively level.

So....back to the original idea of having Trisquel as a home page. Or going to Distrowatch.

The mere act of typing in the name does, it seems, add to things.

In the case of Google, they have a very complex algorithm for moving a site up or down in the returns for an item and some have said that they have an "unstated" policy of bumping up a new site that they think "has worth" or is "commercially helpful to them" to see what happens and then let it sink or swim, but that may be paranoia on the part of people who have said it.

So...given that if one searched once per day for "free Linux" then another person who used the same term might have a better chance of getting Trisquel as one of the higher choices if the website has the word "free" in the metatags.

That, of course would depend on what the developers want to have in the metatags, or the "first sentence" of the website.

If one goes to the main page of the site and right clicks in the left side and clicks "page source" one will see:

Trisquel GNU/Linux | Run free!

So, if one is wanting to SPECIFICALLY target people who want a Linux totally free of encumberance one might have the following text added to the above.

Use a Linux that is both easy and free of any commercial content."

What kind of sentence that would get a "general, non-linux" person interested I don't know, but it shouldn't be too hard to develop such a sentence.

I am in NO WAY trying to "tell the developers what to do" the above is just general discussion of the topic of the thread.

So setting one's home page to Trisquel would probably help in one way and going to DW would help in another and searching each day for it might help in another.

It is complicated.... :(

janus

no problemo