There’s No News Like … Well, There’s Just No News
Posted by Stuart Herbert @ 3:30 PM, Wed 26 Jul 06
Filed under: Gentoo
11 Comments
I guess you could also call this blog post “Why _is_ Gentoo so poor at PR?”
(This posting was inspired by a look at on the experimental (and therefore probably inaccurate) Google Trends tool).
According to the subset of queries that Google Trends currently runs off …
- Interest in Gentoo has peaked, and is now in decline
- The decline began when Ubuntu overtook us on getting news headlines
- Gentoo sucks at generating news that anyone else is interested in
Those statements are definitely inflammatory, but are any of them actually true?
Let’s start by looking at how useful Google Trends is. Google Trends can’t tell why someone is searching about Gentoo. There’s no way to break things down, and separate out queries from folks interested in Gentoo vs queries from folks already using Gentoo. It doesn’t take into account queries about Gentoo-derived distros. It can’t tell me whether folks were googling for Gentoo Linux (our distro), or gentoo penguins.
The only things that it tells us is how often folks are googling for the word Gentoo over time.
Even taking all that into account, tho, it can’t be a co-incidence that the downward trend for searches including the word Gentoo co-incided with the release of Ubuntu 5.04 (which can be seen more clearly on this Google Trends query). It also co-incided with the time that there started to be more news about Ubuntu than Gentoo.
Which leads me to the question that I’ve started this blog entry with … why is there more news about Ubuntu than Gentoo? Take a look at this graph, which looks at trends just for Gentoo. Now, there’s no scale at all on the ‘News’ section of the graph … but we don’t really need one. Look at the peaks. Apart from when Daniel joined Microsoft, the peaks aren’t particularly big (compared to the background noise, which seems to be bumping along close to zero). It appears (and this is no surprise to folks inside Gentoo) that we have a problem with our PR. Apart from releases (which I believe Chris handles personally), it looks like we practically don’t have any PR.
Why should anyone care? Because, if the trend continues, by the end of 2006 there will be no more interest in Gentoo than there was three years ago; and there might even be less interest.
Is Gentoo PR the problem here? (Now we’re firmly into personal opinion land. Post your own at the bottom of this entry!)
- Looking at our PR, it doesn’t appear to be fit for purpose. According to the Gentoo PR Project page, it currently has no leadership (SeJo quit Gentoo recently, and I’m told he was head of PR for a short time), and is focused only on creating presentations for developers to deliver. i.e. it appears to be inward looking, instead of outward looking.
- We have historical problems around posting news articles on the Gentoo homepage, and through the Gentoo-Announce mailing list. Only a small (and undocumented!) list of folks can do this. At the least, this creates a bottleneck. Mostly, it means that everyone doesn’t bother, because it’s easier to not post there.
- There is no RSS newsfeed on the Gentoo homepage. If you look in the page source for the homepage, you can discover that the Gentoo RSS newsfeed is here, but how many folks are going to do that? A quick search through Google for recent Gentoo headlines shows that not many folks syndicate our news.
- It wouldn’t matter if they did. Over 60% of the Gentoo news items are announcements for editions of the Gentoo Weekly News. This may actually be responsible for what Google Trends reports about news about Gentoo. Instead of releasing lots of news regularly, we batch up our news into weekly chunks, and then toss it out via GWN. Another quick search through Google suggests that GWN is syndicated even less than the Gentoo homepage; but that doesn’t take into account sites that republish the content instead of simply syndicating it.
I’m firmly of the opinion that Gentoo needs to make some changes here, to improve matters.
- Scrap the GWN in its current form. Don’t tinker around the edges. Bin it. Instead of GWN publishing new content each week, change it so that it only publishes links to news that has already been published somewhere else. Make GWN a weekly news summary - not the weekly news publication that it currently is. This would also have the huge advantage of reducing the amount of work involved in publishing the GWN, which might help improve its punctuality
- Put an RSS link on the Gentoo homepage, and do something about the news that’s published there. No point in fixing the missing RSS link if the site’s only carrying news that would put a caffeine junkie to sleep …
- Build a Press Room section on www.gentoo.org Let’s give the press a section to help them get into Gentoo - and into covering Gentoo better.
- Build a ‘Getting Started With Gentoo’ section on www.gentoo.org Our homepage is a nasty cluttered thing, and its content is not focused on immediately helping folks who are looking at Gentoo for the very first time. There’s plenty of cruft on the homepage that can make way, after all.
But the most important thing I think Gentoo needs to change is it’s total lack of recognisable senior management. Okay, so the PR project has stumbled, and needs some serious help to sort things out. Shit happens, and no-one’s to blame (we’re all volunteers, and we all have other things in our lives that are more important than Gentoo) … but why is there no-one keeping an eye on our core operations (Bug Wrangling, Developer Relations (our HR team), Documentation, Infrastructure, Package Management, Portage Development, PR, Release Engineering, and Security) and making sure that these projects are all running smoothly and delivering the services that Gentoo as a whole needs?
This is a failing of all Gentoo staff (devs, doc people, infra, forums, etc etc). Too many ostriches happy to bury their heads in their own personal sandpits, and neither follow (nor care) about the bigger picture. Problem is, if everyone behaves like that, the whole structure will fall apart eventually.
Unless that’s sorted out, Gentoo’s decline will continue.
What’s the best way to sort this out? A single dictator? A “council of elders”, staffed with an unelected cabal of “senior” developers with a long and established track record? Change the focus of the existing elected Council (some would say give them a focus for the first time), and measure their success against the health of the core operations listed above? Or build a new organisation on better foundations, and steal Gentoo’s users from it over time?
11 Comments
July 26th, 2006 at 5:09 pm
Reading this I see where things are coming from. Alot of people I’ve seen in the forums are getting to the point they want things to work, to ‘just work’. You can goto Ubuntu/Suse and things are _just working_, and that generates good press. I’ve switched 3 of my personal computers to OpenSuse 10.1 because it works so well. I still have one gentoo computer, and from time to time I have to do footwork with it, and to be honest the only reason it’s still Gentoo is due to the fact that Gentoo offers, by far, a much wider selection of packages than any other distribution, period. Just my 2c.
July 26th, 2006 at 7:27 pm
I think the other problem is the lack of “news-worthy” items. We killed the Gentoo Solaris stuff and other things that while completely useless, would be very popular on Slashdot and other such news sites. I think one of the things that happens is that we dont have central direction anymore. So we only do easy stuff and not that much exciting stuff is actually happening.
July 26th, 2006 at 8:52 pm
These are good ideas. You should post this to gentoo-dev@g.o.
July 26th, 2006 at 8:53 pm
Avuton - we definitely could do better on the “just work” side of things, but I’d always expect commercial distros (with their armies of paid staff) to do better than us on that. Gentoo’s always going to have that “roll your own” aspect to it - it’s part of what we are.
That said, I hear you - and agree with you - that success stories make for good press. We don’t invite folks to submit success stories, and we don’t have anywhere on the website to publish them either. Unlike both Ubuntu and SuSE, we also don’t have anyone going out there and brokering deals with partners or customers to run Gentoo (because that’s not really what we are).
Tester - I think you make a good point about “news-worthy” items. I’m not convinced about the need for central direction for Gentoo as a whole tho. It’d be nice to have *one* roadmap page, where the plans for all the different teams could appear in a single timeline or calendar, but Gentoo appeals to a broad range of users, and I’m convinced part of our success is that (for example) the science team are free to make Gentoo very attractive to their users w/out being held back by other folks.
July 26th, 2006 at 11:52 pm
I think the problem is nothing about PR, but that Developer focus and User focus is so drastically different right now. Users really don’t care all that much about the organization of Gentoo, they just want to `emerge whatever` and have it work. That’s where things are becoming a problem, the developer community wants to focus more on changing structure than getting to the core of the problem. Let developers.. develop.
July 27th, 2006 at 11:16 am
No news…
Well I’ve just written about Gentoo and why I chose it. One small step….
http://www.rjb.za.net/2006/07/27/how-gentoo-has-helped-me/
July 27th, 2006 at 12:12 pm
Well, there’s more than black and white. I do feel we can do better, PR-wise, and we _should_ do better. There’s a lot of good reasons to use Gentoo, and there are reasons not to. But we should talk about that, more than we do now. And we should not try to make everybody believe Gentoo is 42, the solution to everything. That’s stupid PR, too, because there’s no 42. I’m willing to contribute to that, and I think you have made your point, Stuart, but I also don’t see how your post actually helps Gentoo PR .-)
- frilled
July 27th, 2006 at 10:14 pm
Sure ubuntu’s rate of news is higher than gentoo’s but at least ours isn’t negative like Redhat, Mandrake, and Debian.
July 28th, 2006 at 4:29 am
One more thing, to respond to Avuton Olrich’s comment, the reason I love Gentoo is because things “just work” (that includes upgrades) whereas I find this isn’t the case with almost all other distros.
July 28th, 2006 at 6:29 am
I’m interested in helping out to create a press room. I just went to a session at OSCON about OSS public relations, and took a huge pile of notes that I’ll commit to proj/en/pr/ later.
July 28th, 2006 at 10:45 am
When I picked up the 2006.0 livedisk after waiting so long for the lovely graphics, (NOT the graphical installer mind you), I was extremely disappointed. The disk just didn’t *work* on most computers I try it on. I carry around a set of older ones to make sure I always have a boot disk that runs. Wireless and video (mostly resolution for the latter) was terrible.
As a noob, that would be a terrible introduction to gentoo. As a gentoo nut (can you say 65 installs? Oh yes you can.), it just makes me wonder who is running the quality control on the disks, which are most people’s introduction to gentoo.
Since word of mouth is gentoo’s main distribution method, it’s important that what people see is high quality when their friend pops the disk into the drive and says “here, try it!” Bad LiveDisks == Bad PR.
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