I was thinking of turning this into a dot post for the frontpage, and I might just do that yet in some condensed form. Anyway, I figured I'd give a nice roundup of a number of KDE 4.0 related blurbs that have shown up around the internet.
- Erica from Google talks about hosting experiences surrounding the KDE 4.0 release event. It seems that the event was positive from their perspective, which raises the possibility of future interactions with google. Had the event gone badly, we could have burned a rather big bridge, which is still, thankfully, intact today :)
- Ryan chimes in with a few articles related to the event: KDE on multiple platforms (made digg, slashdot, etc.), his review of 4.0.0 (digg frontpage), coverage of the Qt GPL3 announcement (digg and slashdot), and some general coverage of the event itself, including Dragons. He also had the 4.0.0 release announcement coverage from a week earlier. I think his editors will be happy with the traffic sent their way due to his KDE coverage. :)
- Not to be completely outdown, Michael at Phoronix also attended the event with a number of articles to show for it: "KDE 4.0.0 Finally Released!", "KDE 4.1 Release Schedule, Coming In July", "Trolltech Qt To Be Licensed Under GPLv3", "KDE 4.0 Release Event". If he wasn't getting autoburied on digg, these would have seen much wider coverage, but even then, quite a few of the links ended up on osnews.com and similar websites.
- Speaking of osnews: one of the worst pieces of journalism I've ever seen is their review of KDE 4.0.0 -- thankfully most of the problems that they point out are fixed already in trunk or the 4.0.x branch.
- Wired also obviously "gets it", although the comments from their reader base are way off the mark. I guess some people can never appreciate how much work goes into developing something that is free!
- We even got CNet coverage for the actual release, which is somewhat of a big deal, since the only time they seem to cover KDE is when it relates to ubuntu in some way (so basically, never).
- More coverage from around the web of the actual release (Jan 11th): Internet.com, Bruce Byfield via Earthweb, Computer Weekly, and many more articles via google news (we've really been pushing out KDE articles like crazy this year).
- We also show up on a fair number of blogs these days... if you're like me, and you want to make sure that the community at large is understanding the message that we (as the marketing team) is putting out, monitoring the blogs is a good way to check if we're being clear. There was a lot of confusing in the lead up to 4.0.0 in the blogosphere, but post 4.0.0, it seems that most people understand now what this release was about. If not, go watch Aaron's keynote again :)
Lifehacker writes about KDE 4 which is a decent read, and has seen a lot of coverage.
Lastly, I would like to thank all of those that are covering KDE in any way you are: it helps to spread the word beyond the 'captive audience' that read the dot or planetkde. In addition, we are somewhat cursed on the dot with being a (nearly-)first party news outlet, so will report most things with high degrees of pro-KDE bias. Most of the outside world writes about KDE without having to figuratively 'live with the people they are covering', which means they are free to bash or praise as they see fit. Fortunately, most of the coverage (notwithstanding osnews, although they have linked to plenty of positive coverage) has been overwhelmingly positive.
There are still a few people out there (especially those posting comments on digg/ars/etc.) that just don't get it, and try to compare us to commercial offerings. To those people, I would suggest that they try to remember that most of us are doing this in our spare time, as volunteers, and the fact that we've created anything more usable than bash in the last 11 years is a huge success. We don't belong to the same ecosystem that windows and mac belong to, and it's difficult to properly review things when you realise that features only exist because someone decided to implement it for themselves, and not because they were instructed to... We don't have 4 billion dollars to develop KDE 4.0.0, and yet can still hold our own against vista... think about it folks.
Cheers, and enjoy post 4.0.0.
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