Linux Rent-A-Crowd (not serious)

[Johnsie]

This is silly but maybe it would be good to have a linux rent-a-mob that encourages Linux users to visit certain sites en-masse. That way companies would look at their stats and say, "wow, a lot of our visitors are using Linux, how can we meet their needs?".

Maybe some kind of firefox button/extension like stumbleupon that makes a random site come up that we want to support Linux... so it appears in their stats that a Linux user visited. "Click every day to promote Linux"

Oh yeah and users could uncheck any specific sites they didnt want to come up.


Feel free to comment.

[Johnsie]

double post ;-/

[TravisNewman]

the only problem is that if a company knows that such a firefox extension exists, they'll chalk any gain in Linux users up to that, even if there is legitimate growth.

It's like there for a while, people were trying to get people to visit the distrowatch page for Ubuntu to get the rating higher. After that, people chalked up the page hit ranking to motives like that and didn't take it seriously for a while.

The best way to achieve such goals is this: whenever you see a website that doesn't work with Firefox, or see a program that doesn't work with Linux, email the marketing team of that company, and explain the benefits of supporting Firefox/Linux/whatever. They're more likely to listen than the technical department. You report a firefox problem to the support people and they'll say "sorry, we only support IE." If you report a problem to the marketing people, they'll be more likely to want that other 10 percent of people to be able to access their site.

[Johnsie]

You have a good point.... I guess what you said and promoting Linux to potential new users are the best ways forward. We do need to be seen to be heard but if people knew we were falsely making ourselves to be bigger than we really were they probably would indeed chalk us down.