Raw

Just checked back on the geek pop video I put up on Tuesday: 111 hits, 4 likes, 1 dislike - heh, satisfactory ratio.

I don't have the energy for advocacy and am not really interested in marketing, but it did get me wondering how you would actually target an audience in this day and age - talking to the right people is efficient communication, right? Clearly folks like Google believe they can target arbitrary demographics with their advertising, identifying the appropriate audience through analysis of user behaviour. Done accurately, it's no longer advertising as such but more about making a connection between some kind of provider and a willing recipient.

In this specific case, the primary target would really be perhaps a person who uses a computer a lot, but only has a minor interest in dev, if any. They probably get most of their desktop software through regular commercial channels, supplemented by dodgy copies of things from their friends. It would be in the interests of this person to know about open source if only in the sense of better software for free. But most of the people reading this will be a hop or two removed from that demographic. Exaggerating for effect, the Open Source Circle has no intersection with the Regular User Circle. How do you find paths through? Ok, maybe there's one that goes [open source user] - [open source geek] - [.net geek] - [MS Windows user]. Yeah, (social) graph problems.

There's potential around communities of interest. Again in this particular case a graphic designer that normally uses Photoshop may be in contact with a Gimp user.

There's an aspect of this I reckon is still really virgin territory, ripe for colonization: I'm sure I've heard better terms but call it "shared objects". My guitar is of generic type Stratocaster, so if someone else has a guitar is of generic type Stratocaster there's a very good chance we've got other things in common. It's close to what Amazon already does around recommendations, but I reckon it could be done a whole lot smarter and in a way that's more broadly useful. It's a Semantic Web/Linked Data idea that's also entirely in scope for schema.org and RDFa/microdata work.

Uldis Bojars did some work around the "shared objects" thing a year or two back, I must pester him again for references.

Comments to G+ please