On Mon, 17 Jun 1996 00:32:26 -0500 Winship <[log in to unmask]> said: >Yes, folks, you too can help to promote LSOFT ! ;-) All right Doug, I'm obviously not in sales and it looks like I didn't do a very good job here. I guess I'm just going to have to try harder :-) The stories that will promote *L-Soft* are the *organization* stories. I don't need to tell you that they work both ways. The *personal* stories are not about promoting L-Soft, they're about giving LISTSERV a *human face*. With all due respect, no manager is going to send us a check because Douglas Winship mumbled something on our web site about having a such great time running the AUTOCAT list in his spare time. They'll send us a check because they read the story by XYZ Inc. that said LISTSERV helped them save time and money. I'm painting this in black and white when in reality there are shades of grey in the picture, but the personals aren't meant to be advertising material. They're here to tell other people, who may never have heard of mailing lists, that the Internet isn't just the web and you can do all sorts of wonderful things using this old fashioned medium that may not pop up k00l 3D grafx on your PC after 5 minutes of download time but does convey in-depth, meaningful information suitable for consumption by people who have realized that the power switch on their brain also has an ON setting and who have been desperately looking for the corresponding setting on their web browser. Call it promotion if you must, but it's long term promotion through social change and information, not glossyware. Myself I call it making it easier for newbies to relate to a techno-buzzword by putting a human face on the buzzword. And, of course, being listed on our web site also promotes your list and your efforts (which may or may not be desirable, depending on the list :-) ). Perhaps the free shirt business was misunderstood. You couldn't have known of course, but there will be plenty of free shirts given out over the summer. The idea wasn't to bribe people for a nice quote, it was more of a "welcome to the club" type of thing, plus the beneficiaries will get their shirts before others and be able to talk about them on the list while everyone wonders what they look like :-) Disclaimer: we don't have the shirts yet :-( Anyway, I would be highly surprised if anyone on this list made up a nice story in order to get a free shirt. Now I can think of a number of people who would do that for a bounce processing AI, but not for a shirt ;-) Finally, I forgot to mention that we need these stories fairly soon, 1-2 weeks at the most. Since the stories are meant to be short and include a link to (presumably) existing home pages, I don't feel that this is unrealistic. Eric