09 January, 2008

Viral marketing rocks!

Hi everyone!

Within a few days the release announcement of KDE 4.0 will be finished and put on the web. You can imagine we, the promo ppl, are working very hard to create a good, quality announcement to do justice to the enormous amount of hard work put into KDE in the last 2 years. After all, we envision KDE 4.0 will be the beginning of something great. I've just been trying KDE 4.0.0, and I can only say I feel proud to be part of this community. I know I haven't written a single line of code - as I simply can't. But I still feel KDE 4.0.0 is a little bit mine ;-)

To guide reviewers and new users through KDE 4.0.0, we have tried to write not just a press announcement and a what's new, like we did for the beta's and RC's, but a much more 'do this and that' like guide. We hope to receive quality reviews that way - after all, if you're thrown in the KDE 4.0.0 desktop, you might feel a bit alienated. It is very different from KDE 3.5.x, after all. I might add that, as far as I know, this was Sebas' brilliant vision - don't underestimate our Master Teddy Bear!

Now we, the promo team, have a request for you all. We need to get the word out. We want everybody to know about KDE 4.0 - and unfortunately, we only have commit rights to kde.org ;-)

So we would like to ask every single one of you to help out. Please submit the release announcement (and the visual guide) to all kinds of news sites. Digg it, Reddit, put it on del.icio.us, shoutwire, but also local media sites like menéame, Fuzz, yigg or Tweakers. Post it on formums, talk about it on IRC, blog about it... Spread the word!

Even though it is the first release in the KDE 4 series introducing many new technologies, I am confident KDE 4.0 presents a stable and usable desktop to its users. I hope this release will encourage people all over the world to explore the exciting possibilities brought by it. In time, we will build and improve on this framework, and bring over all the functionality users have come to expect from the KDE 3 series - and more, of course.

We need to get this message out there - and YOU are the ones who need to do that.

7 comments:

  1. how can I translate the announcement? (to Russian)

    could you send it to me privately?
    shaforostoff [shift+2] kde -dot- ru

    ReplyDelete
  2. I always submit big KDE-news to Tweakers (probably you do too). Even had a heavy discussion with them about priorities and keeping KDE silent.

    Seems that they start to learn though....

    ReplyDelete
  3. I can translate to Arabic (400+ million speakers), can you send me the announcement in private too?

    kefah [shift+2] freesoft -dot- jo

    ReplyDelete
  4. Is there some printable media that you are releasing as well? Would be good to put things up at the university :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. We need a release name too. Kde 4.0.0 must be a named version, a milestone, a rock in history.
    I hope marketing will take care of that ;-) and for my 0.02 euros, i suggest:
    KDE Quattro
    (Four in Italian)

    ReplyDelete

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