Inviting members from the larger community

Question

I was thinking of sending out invitation letters to listed members of Inspire and other databases (excepting experimental physicists).

Would this be a good idea, or should we wait for some time to gauge how our site progresses - maybe three months or more?

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Comments

Please don't. It is likely to turn people off the site before we even begin. A far better way to grow the site is word of mouth recommendations. Most of us personally know a large number of physicists, and people who find this a useful tool are likely to mention it to colleagues.

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True. Well, it was just a proposition. :)

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I agree, word of mouth would definitely be preferable to unsolicited spamming.

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Answer 1

I'm not sure if this will be appreciated, it could certainly come off as spam. In my opinion a better way is to talk to people you know personally about the site.

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Comments

Couldn't agree more.

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Answer 2

Once you're out of private beta, get high profile bloggers (Michael Nielsen/Aaronson/the n-cafe folks/Peter Woit/Sean Carroll and others) to mention the site if you can. that can be quite effective.

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Comments

I'd add Quantum Pontiff blog to this list.

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@Marcin: The pontiff is no longer the pontiff. But one of the committers to the site has taken over one third of the reigns.

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@Suresh: You got +1 from me, but I think I should note that there is a bit of a difference between our situation here and that of cstheory. As far as I can tell the computational complexity blog is mostly frequented by people working in TCS and related fields. The same is not true of some of the big physics blogs, like Peter Woit's and Sean Carroll's blogs. There is a huge number of what I might call physics enthusiasts out there who are not really in a position to contribute to a research level site.

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We also have the crackpot problem at a scale unprecedented in other fields. Math and TCS certainly have crackpots. P vs NP certainly attracts a lot, as does the Collatz conjecture and there are any number of snake oil merchants centred on compression and crypto, but in physics the scale is just different. There are vast swathes of people who will swear blind that everything we've learned since the late 1800s is wrong, and there is an endless procession of self-proclaimed experts appearing in the media and tell people that quantum mechanics means you can alter reality simply by thinking hard.

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