[Clipart] Introduction to the Open Clip Art Library

[Bryce Harrington]

On Thu, Jun 30, 2005 at 09:06:00PM -0400, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
> 
> clipart (currently we are 25th, i.e., third page)
> clip art (currently we are 23rd, i.e., third page)
> clip-art (currently we ar 24th, i.e., third page)
> "clip art" (currently we are 19th, i.e., second page)
> 
> We did recently make the first page for vector clip art, for whatever
> that's worth (although for "vector clip art" as a phrase we are not
> even in the first four pages).
> 
> Even better, we are fourth for public domain clip art and sixth for
> public domain clipart.
> 
> We are, not surprisingly, number one for open clip art library, but
> people will only find us that way if they already know we exist.  
> 
> We also are third for svg clipart and both first and second (via our
> own domain name and the freedesktop.org domain name, respectively) for
> svg clip art.

> I take the trouble to note all of these statistics mainly so that the
> numbers will be in the mailing list archive, for the express purpose
> of allowing us to compare at some point in the future...

Ooh, nice statistics!  Yes, this is good information to keep track of.
Early on with Inkscape I found it fun to track our stats on SF against
similar projects, so we could gage how well we were growing.  I think
your stat collection will be helpful for OCAL to measure its
penetration, and I'm going to look forward to seeing the future
updates.  :-)
 
> eventually have all the pagerank we need.  If you do the Google
> searches listed above, you find that many of the results are inferior
> in one way or another to our collection; if our collection continues
> to improve, we will eventually rise past most of them.  Search results
> only very occasionally change suddenly; usually the shift is gradual,
> but it does catch on -- the search engines are *designed* to get the
> most compelling results to the top of the list.  So we should focus on
> making the collection and the site compelling and useful, and let
> Google worry about how to get their algorithm to list us first :-)

Sounds like a very good strategy.  :-)

One other suggestion I have, that I've found to be quite effective in
getting public awareness up, is to write magazine articles.  I've had
good successes in doing this for other projects; I did several articles
early on for Inkscape and we saw that it significantly increased our
traffic and userbase size. 

I find that interesting articles tend to get picked up all over the
place, and either reprinted or linked to from a lot of different sites.
They also tend to be effective at getting sites with links to various
things to be motivated to include yours too.

Thus, I think Jon's paper is going to be instrumental in helping grow
OCAL's awareness.  We also have some things that touch on OCAL
tangentially - I did an article on DMS that includes ample mention of
us, and I've added a link to our site from the Inkscape site.

I'd like to encourage others to write magazine articles, too.  I can
give tips for how to get published, and know the editors for several
Linux magazines.  Articles run about 1500 words, which works out to a
couple day's worth of work, plus some copyediting.  For writers who
haven't published before, I would suggest starting by writing for
the KDE or Gnome news sites, which are easy to write for and will
publish your article relatively quickly.  Then when you're more
comfortable with your writing, work on getting into the online and print
magazines.

Btw, the editor for Linux World magazine contacted me last week looking
for articles; I don't have time to write anything, but if anyone else is
interested let me know and I'll put you in touch.  I was very impressed
with how they published my article last month.

Bryce