[okfn-discuss] Promoting the Public Domain Review?

Tue Mar 1 23:44:55 UTC 2011

Another suggestion for your site that you're welcomed not to take, I noticed that the front page features the latest article. How about changing it into a summary of a few of the latest posts. The reason being, mostly people will skim the first page and if it happens that they don't see anything they like they will quickly close the site. If you have a few (3-5) works on the front page you have a better chance of at least one of the work catching their attention and show that your site has variety.

Try Project Gutenberg, also look at these sites:  http://thebookreview.gather.com/ , http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Literature/ , http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/Bookworms_Reading_Group, http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/booksamonth/, 

Are you  in contact with the openlibrary.org people?  They have a twitter, offer cross promotion or just ask them to tweet about you. They have a general discussion mailing list and you can probably  post about the site there. 

I suggest making the post in the form of something that asks for suggestions, i.e. suggestion for works to be reviewed /  improvement to the site rather than a direct advertisement ? Note also that some groups have rules about posting websites/others, and you probably need to put OT in your subject. 

The gather.com site I posted up there has multiple groups inside that you can search, I took a quick look at their guidelines and they say they may allow promotion of free services in the freebies group if it's not self promoting, might mean you have to use a non okfn email :P 
AND 
You can join some of the other groups and copy paste parts of one interesting article from the site you think is relevant to that group and just put a link at the bottom "Taken from The Public Domain Review http://blahblah , go to the site for other reviews" or something like that.

I hope this isn't too cunning. I'd love to know if it works 

Dewi