Jordy Blog

Software for Starving Students 2007.01 — RELEASED

Here’s the press release we sent out:

The 2007.01 release of Software for Starving Students is now available for download.

Software for Starving Students is a free collection of programs organized for students (but available to anyone). We’ve gathered a list of best-in-class programs onto one CD (one disc for OS X, one for Windows), including a fully-featured office suite, a cutting-edge web browser, multi-media packages, academic tools, utilities and more.

More info:

• Project homepage
• A complete list of included titles
• Screenshots

Please help us out by seeding the torrent, spreading the word, and burning copies for your friends and family. (Nothing spreads holiday cheer like good, free software.)

Happy Downloading!

Last year this got hundreds of thousands of downloads after getting posted on the front page of Digg. Here’s this year’s entry.

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SSS PageRank Now 0?

I just noticed that the PageRank (via the Google toolbar) for Software for Starving Students project sank clear back to 0 after a brief stint at 5. The crummy thing is, I can’t figure out why. Although the site has very infrequent updates, it is constantly getting new inbound links. Our traffic has decreased during the slow season of our release cycle, but PageRank is independent of traffic. The only suspicion that I have is that many sites (including Apple) use the exact text from our website without linking back. Now, I’m not too upset about being blatantly plagiarized (in fact, I took special care when writing the text knowing that it would likely be used and reused across the internet), but I think Google may be dinging us for having what is now “repeat” information.

Does anyone have any experience with this happening to your site? Are there any other ideas as to what might cause this phenomenon? I love Google, but I hate getting dumped without knowing why. Ideas?

SSS PageRank

The PageRank for Software for Starving Students (via Google’s toolbar) went clear from 0 to 5 with the latest data update. That’s pretty indicative of the almost immediate success the project has enjoyed. The site has only been up since the very end of December but has had some really incredible growth. Just check out the Alexa traffic:

As the project’s volunteer marketing director, I’ve had a valuable lesson cemented in my mind. SoftwareFor had practically no link recruitment; we just focused on making a really cool (free) product. We included top-of-the-line open source programs and gave it a sleek GUI. About the only “marketing” involved me staying up all night and polishing up some very good quotable text for the webpages. In other words, we focused almost exclusively on making a cool product –which (after all) is what the market wants.

The project got almost 1000 Diggs (thus the traffic spike) because it was cool. People from all over the world linked to it because it was useful to them, not because a bunch of suits spent a lot of money trying to jam it down their throats. Our traffic spiked and our PageRank jumped because we provided a service that people legitimately wanted.

Conclusion: The market doesn’t care how much you spend on it. Instead it wants to know what you can do for it. If what you offer is cool, then your “customers” will market your product for you. A cool product (or service) almost sells itself.

Although link recruitment (for SEO purposes) and reaching your market are important, many people and companies take the wrong approach. It’s not about beating the system via comment spam, round-the-clock commercials, or anything else. It’s the classic standoff of “Push vs Pull”, and with today’s technological sounding boards, “pull” always wins.

The best way to market your products is to give the market what it wants. In other words, just be cool. Be remarkable, and people will remark.

Gary Thornock Gets Hired

My friend Gary told me he was just hired on as a contractor for Provo Labs doing php and mysql development.  It’s funny that I heard it from him rather than at work.

Gary is really into BSD and is a big supporter of Software for Starving Students.  It’ll be fun working with him.

SSS is Apple’s Featured Download

Jake Spurlock IMed me pointing out that the Mac version of the Software for Starving Students CD is listed as Apple’s featured download for Mac OS X. This is great exposure for the project. Good work team. :)

January Geek Dinner

We finally posted details about the upcoming Geek Dinner. I wanted to give the DevUtah site an overhaul first, but alas, no time. Here they are:

DevUtah’s next Geek Dinner will be held at 6:00 this Tuesday night at the Miller Business Innovation Center on the Salt Lake Community College campus (9690 South 300 West, Sandy).

We’ll have two short educational presentations by accomplished attorneys who will discuss legal topics for geeks. Nathan Nelson will talk about legal aspects of selling your software concepts, starting your own software development company (code shop), or becoming an independent developer. David McKenzie will discuss popular myths about software patents and copyright ownership relating to contractors.

We will also have a brief mini-presentation by Dave Turnbull from SoftwareFor.org, who will talk about some of the successes and failures of the last release of “Software for Starving Students”, which had over 25,000 downloads in just a few days.

The event will be catered by Panache Catering. Each attendee is required to contribute $7 to help cover the costs. Attendees are strongly encouraged to prepay burnsadria@hotmail.com via PayPal, although cash and checks will also be accepted at the door.

Hope to see you there.

SSS is a Hit!

A few days ago, Dave posted about Software for Starving Students on Digg, and the downloads started coming immediately. With well over 20,000 downloads the last time I checked (a couple of days ago), the project has become a major success. We’ve transferred over 11 terabytes of data and our seeders have held up fine, although a lot of that was done through xmission and other generous mirrors. We also learned a valuable lesson: to turn off wiki and other high computation areas of our site beforehand next time.

We’ve had about 10 people volunteer to be distributor liaisons in schools all over, as well as several interested in helping with translation and distribution for versions in Italy and Cambodia. It’s incredible how small the world has become because of the flattening force of internet. It’s amazing that a few volunteers can work on a little project and have it distributed all over the world, instantly. And that’s one of the reasons that open source is thriving: it leverages free labor from skilled workers distributed all over the world, then redistributes contributions almost instantaneously around the globe. I have a lot to say about the dynamics of open source but will do that later. I’m just glad to see the SSS have seen such tremendous success. After many late nights, it’s rewarding to see our efforts pay off, and it feels good to give a little back to the open source community after so many years of quality mooching.

Software for Starving Students v 2006.01

Well, after a lot of hard work from the Software for Starving Students dev team, the latest version of SSS is available just in time for the oncoming semester. Dave Turnbull made some major GUI enhancements that will make it way easier to navigate, and there were lots of new programs, updates, and screenshots added.

The BitTorrent for this release has actually been seeded for over a day, but I didn’t finish the press release until about 1:30 this morning. Just a few minutes later there were already 19 downloads started, and I’ve contacted a lot of people since. I think there will be a huge amount of action this morning when people start waking up, but it may be a little sluggish because of the weekend. So it will be interesting to see if the amount of traffic makes a good dent. I’ve never really used BitTorrent (pathetic – I know) so I’m excited to find out.

SoftwareFor is doing some really neat stuff that I’ll discuss in later posts; I’ve got to get to bed!

But enough about you…

I guess I have time to blog, now that I’m done with school. I just graduated magna cum laude with a BA in Business Managment from UVSC. It’s been long and sucky, but now it’s over. :) Actually, I rather enjoyed the experience and will look back with fondness. Hopefully I’ll be able to continue learning everyday, an effort that may actually be easier now that school is out.

A bit about me:

I’ve been married for almost 2 years and have 1 kid on the way, a (currently unnamed) girl due on Feb 15, 2006. My wife (Julie) is awesome and we both come from good, close families.

I served as a missionary for the LDS church in Joao Pessoa, Brazil. I speak fluent Portuguese and decent Spanish. I’m a big music fan and like to play guitar (another hobby long-neglected because of school).

I’m 27 years old and have worked for most of my life (since junior high) at Castle Rock, my dad’s souvenir shop in Orem, UT. It’s been great for me because I’ve been able to work with and learn from my dad, who is one of the kindest people in the world. It’s also been very flexible, which is important for anyone trying to succeed in school. I recently started a job as a “Small Business Portfolio / Project Manager” at Provo Labs, Paul B. Allen’s recently funded internet business incubator. My first day is tomorrow, and I’m excited to learn.

I’ve also been fairly involved in the open source community in Utah, co-founding the Utah Valley Linux Users Group and doing some (mostly nominal) work with the Software for Starving Students project.

Well, that’s probably enough for a first post. Don’t want to bore my 0 readers. :)