tea.mathoverflow.net - Discussion Feed (How to promote MathOnline)

Andrea comments on "How to promote MathOnline" (5361)

Andrea — Wed, 05 May 2010 05:40:03 -0700

@Kevin: thank you for your suggestion. I have just posted there.

Kevin Buzzard comments on "How to promote MathOnline" (5359)

Kevin Buzzard — Wed, 05 May 2010 04:01:13 -0700

@Andrea: post to sci.math.research .

Harry Gindi comments on "How to promote MathOnline" (5334)

Harry Gindi — Mon, 03 May 2010 13:24:41 -0700

@jonas: I suspect that if you reread the title of this discussion, you will see what is wrong with your post. =p

jonas comments on "How to promote MathOnline" (5333)

jonas — Mon, 03 May 2010 13:12:21 -0700

Update: ah, disregard this answer. Thanks to Harry Gindi.

If you can just wait a few years, real mathematical articles with links to mathoverflow discussions will start to appear in journals. Even earlier than that, people will be discussing with each other what mathematical problems they had that someone on mathoverflow solved. If the site is useful for research, the word will spread. Don't worry.

Ben Webster comments on "How to promote MathOnline" (5282)

Ben Webster — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 17:23:28 -0700

Harry- Actually, it's not surprising anywhere; it's just a lot of US universities don't, in practice, take any masters students. There is then the further caveat that how these notions correspond to things in other countries can be a bit complicated. I don't know where Dror is, but for many years, Germany, for example, didn't have a Bachelor's degree; going to university meant getting a Masters.

Kevin Lin comments on "How to promote MathOnline" (5270)

Kevin Lin — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 01:01:06 -0700

@Harry: I think that's typical in Europe.

Harry Gindi comments on "How to promote MathOnline" (5243)

Harry Gindi — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 17:11:25 -0700

They separate graduate students into masters and doctoral students? That's somewhat surprising.

Dror Speiser comments on "How to promote MathOnline" (5241)

Dror Speiser — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 17:08:31 -0700

I took up Scott's idea and sent a message to the masters students at my uni. They'll tell the doctorate students, and they'll tell the postdoc, and they'll tell the professors, and they'll the undergraduate students. Hopefully.

Andrea comments on "How to promote MathOnline" (5233)

Andrea — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:52:09 -0700

Actually there is :hover magic, as the arrow should turn into a hand (or whatever your set of icons defines as a pointer).

For the spam, I don't know. I can think of three reasons.
1) I may be missing some headers (but which ones?)
2) Maybe other people on my server, which is on shared hosting, are on blacklists, so that IP is considered harmful
3) Gmail sends some particular headers and SPAM filters recognize that the mail actually does not come from the Gmail account it claims to be (of course it cannot, since it is sent by my server).

I frankly don't know what to do (maybe changing address would solve 3). In any case, people using openid login do not need to confirm anything, so maybe I could just make the openid login more prominent.

Mariano comments on "How to promote MathOnline" (5220)

Mariano — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 13:47:06 -0700

Andrea, I registered. Very nice! :)

My confirmation email was thought to be spam by gmail. I cannot tell why, really, for it looks just like many other confirmation emails I've gotten which were not spam-looking...

I'd suggest changing the 'Edit' button in the 'Change your openid account' tab of one's profile into 'Change'. And, is at all possible, to do make the css :hover magic on the buttons/links on the right of http://mathonline.andreaferretti.it/pages/home be more evident, so as to indicate they are sensitive. The text does change a bit when the pointer hovers over it, but it is rather subtle!

Andrea comments on "How to promote MathOnline" (5209)

Andrea — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 09:29:05 -0700

To quicken up things I have directly turned you into a confirmed user. Also, if you wish, I can promote you to moderator. Not that there is much activity to moderate now... :-) (of course I can promote any other high reputation user)

Qiaochu Yuan comments on "How to promote MathOnline" (5208)

Qiaochu Yuan — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 08:34:06 -0700

I would love to blog about MathOnline... as soon as you send me another confirmation e-mail! The first one was accidentally spammed and deleted. (The username is Qiaochu Yuan.)

Andrea comments on "How to promote MathOnline" (5207)

Andrea — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 01:02:00 -0700

@Harry: No, I'm not american, so I did not realize this. Different countries have different deadlines :-)

@grp: Indeed I think it was of big help that MathOnline was mentioned on the SBS. I don't know personally much bloggers, maybe I should write them anyway.

@Scott: Thank you again for your help!

Scott Morrison comments on "How to promote MathOnline" (5199)

Scott Morrison — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 21:04:28 -0700

Just a few hours ago I took over the conversation at the Berkeley topology seminar dinner to plug MathOnline. More of the same? Perhaps I should write to allgrads@math.berkeley.edu.

Harry Gindi comments on "How to promote MathOnline" (5197)

Harry Gindi — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 19:23:43 -0700

@Kevin: Everyone in #math-ag has been silent for the past week, and they're all over the country, which was what motivated my statement.

grp comments on "How to promote MathOnline" (5195)

grp — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 19:16:01 -0700

See if you can get on Slashdot, math blogs, etc. Also, those who are willing to contribute material may also be willing to link to your site.

Gerhard "Ask Me About System Design" Paseman, 2010.04.28

Kevin Lin comments on "How to promote MathOnline" (5193)

Kevin Lin — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 19:03:27 -0700

@Harry: You realize also that a lot of people are not doing finals, or teaching, or anything related to classes this week, right? :-)

Harry Gindi comments on "How to promote MathOnline" (5191)

Harry Gindi — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 17:36:35 -0700

@Andrea: You realize also that a lot of people are doing finals this week, right?

Andrea comments on "How to promote MathOnline" (5188)

Andrea — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 16:30:14 -0700

As many of you know, I've been recently launching MathOnline, a site dedicated to collecting (in a somewhat organized way) mathematical material. I'm now taking advantage of the offer of Scott to post one more question about it.

The problem is how to promote it effectively. In these days I got some subscription, but there are sadly few books added and even less votes and reviews. I guess that's part of life, maybe people just don't want to hang around a site of commented lecture notes. But I'm wondering if someone can be done. So I'm asking your advice (and maybe your help): is there something I can do to spread the word better about MathOnline? What I've done so far is posting this here and advertising it to some friend in universitied all over the world, with the request to tell where they work.

I think one of the main points would be to reach undergraduates (and graduate students in their first years). These are the people following more courses, and they have a lot of free time to help there. Unfortunately, I'm now in a research institute, hence I have no teaching duties this year.

Another thing I may do is keeping adding material until I reach a critical size. Indeed I usually add one thing or two every day, but I think I'd rather spend my time developing the missing features and... well, doing mathematics :-). Any other ideas?