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Number   :  32
Date     :  2001-05-16
Author   :  Kan Yabumoto
Subject  :  Re: Everybody, let us promote this group.
Size(KB) :  3


At 2001-05-16 05:59, Jim Sadler wrote:

> Rome was built one brick at a time. Hang in there
>and at a certain point it will gather its own
>momentum. But I would suggest thinking over a much
>longer period of time.
> Jim
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Sorry for dwelling on an issue many of you consider moot.

Although I like the old saying, I have a more pessimistic view
on the fate of this kind of discussion groups. I believe we should
not expect a successful discussion group happens all by itself.

I'm quite certain that behind every successful group, there are
a few dedicated people who care about the group. I'm sure our
group moderator, Jim Withespoon cares about it for not reason than
that he happened to have started it.

As to my involvement with this group, I hate to be too "dominant"
in this group since it started as and should be an "independent"
discussion group. Our (Pixelab's) corporate goal (let's face
it, it is a for-profit organization) may not always coincide with
the user community's collective goal. And, people may even be
rightly skeptical on a corporate-sponsored forum. We can worry
about this much later. Now, our main focus is to get this group
to go beyond the infant stage to a vibrant self-supporting bunch
of users.

My overall pessimism comes from the fact that this group has
no particular visibility from outside world. Unless you,
a group member diligently write emails to friends, new users
would not show up in this group out of the blue. One factor
I took a look at was the fact that this group was classified
in the "Freeware and Shareware". That was the choice by Jim
who initiated this group. While many XXCOPY users view it as
a Freeware, if you examine what kind of groups there are in the
same category inside the Yahoo groups, there is no functional
commonality. It is purely the classification by the method of
distribution of the software rather than the purpose and the
utility of the software product. The next closest thing in
the existing Yahoo classification is the "Backup" section which
is the other extreme, being too narrow in its scope. I wish
they have a "file-management-tools" section but that would be
a fantasy. When we list XXCOPY in various freeware/shareware
listing sites, we reluctantly choose the "Backup" category
as the best compromise. At least, the Yahoo Backup category
would have given a little more visibility to this group since
there are much less entries there (only 15 entries). On the
other hand, here in the "Freeware and Shareware" category,
this group is buried inside a big pile (635) of totally
unrelated entries.

Therefore, we should not expect anybody routinely stumble
into this group by chance. For one thing, in the future, we
plan to add a few lines at the bottom of the XXCOPY /HELP
text which informs the current XXCOPY users to come join
this group.

But what about those who otherwise visit the XXCOPY web site
after hearing about it in the usenet newsgroups? If everybody
posts his/her XXCOPY questions in this forum (that means, no
posts in the newsgroup), the existence of this group "competes"
against the general newsgroups. At least the regular newsgroups
have a mechanism for a huge exposure factor whereas this group
is "closed" only to those who already know what XXCOPY is.

That is why I'm concerned about the fact that this group has
no automatic self-promotion mechanism. I bet almost all of
the current members (some 74 this morning) are here from
our mass Email campaign.

Maybe, we should take turn and post some of the well-written
articles in this group on the general newsgroups such as

alt.msdos.batch
alt.comp.freeware
comp.os.ms-windows.apps.utilities.win95

Anybody, any comments?


Kan Yabumoto

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