[geeklog-devel] Perception is everything...

[Marco Belmonte]

Well said, Mark.

 

From: geeklog-devel-bounces at lists.geeklog.net [mailto:geeklog-devel-bounces at lists.geeklog.net] On Behalf Of Mark R. Evans
Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2008 7:39 AM
To: Geeklog Development
Subject: Re: [geeklog-devel] Perception is everything...

 

Generally a re-branding is something that is done to support a much larger effort, a new focus or a new direction.  To re-brand or rename just for the sake of a change is, in my opinion, a large effort with very little benefit.  Cost and effort are high, not to mention, the limitation of domain names to choose from...

"What's in a name? that which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet;"

Geeklog is what it is.  If there is a perception that it is dead then I would address that perception directly.  Why is it perceived to be dead?  Lack of releases?  Lack of documentation?  Lack of a growing developer base?  Lack of direction? Lack of communication? Lack of themes? Lack of plugins?  Lack of community? I won't offer any answers to this question, that I'll leave to the core team to figure out.  My only advice is to understand why there is a negative perception and address those issues directly.

Solve the identify crisis that is Geeklog.  Define what it is and standardize on that definition.  With a little effort you can find Geeklog defined as 3 distinct tools, a blog, a CMS and an application development framework.  It is all of those, but how do you summarize this into something that can be the center or focus of a marketing theme?  Dirk summed it up well in his Using Geeklog as an Application Development Framework presentation;  Geeklog is; An application to manage dynamic web content.  Rally around that statement, build on it and publicize it.

Changing the name, in my opinion, would simply be a distraction from real work that needs to be done (release 1.5, write documentation, figure out how to put up a tracker, clean up the downloads area on geeklog.net, update the developer tools; universal toolkit and documentation, define some development standards, i.e.; core technology directions for style sheets, javascript librarys, etc.).

I think the idea of profiling Geeklog sites is a great marketing tool.  It also shows off what can be done with Geeklog.  It also shows off the user base, the flexibility and scalability of Geeklog.  

Thanks!
Mark




On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 8:13 PM, Tony Bibbs <tony at tonybibbs.com> wrote:

Ok, so I've got a couple of points related to the "Is Geeklog Dead" question.

First of all, I'd be happy to do weekly or bi-monthly posts on gl.net about successful GL installations.  The idea is simple, have a standard form asking users about their decision to use Geeklog, what features are most important to them, areas of improvement and whatnot.  I've got at least a half dozen sites at the State of Iowa I could recommend and I know we can dig up a lot more including some of our most noteable like Groklaw, etc.

Also, more controversial, I've struggled with the Geeklog brand.  I don't doubt that we've garnered some respect in the open source CMS areana but I have a hard time selling non-techies on "Geeklog".  In fact it is to the point I just call it a "Content Management System" to avoid the silly looks I get.  My question is am I the only one that feels this way?  If not, I'd like to suggest renaming the project and allowing community participation on picking the name.  I'm fine with leaving it as Geeklog but figured it'd be worth discussion.  I'll go crawl under a rock now...

--Tony


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