The Internet and the Cactus Hobby

[bcss]

A few of you may remember when the Internet burst on to the Cactus scene abot 12 years ago. I was an extremely early adopter being involved in the early documentation of the Internet. When I first joined it was with a 1200 baud modem and telephone calls at long distance rates. That taught you to be economical! There was virtually nothing on line about cacti. The Cactus-Mall was the second webpage on the hobby on the net, making it one of the longest surviving websites. Dr Ralph Martin has the priveldege of being the first. From the outset I conceieved the Cactus-Mall as an international venture and so it has remained bringing cactophiles across the world together. The other feature of those days was cacti_etc an international mailing list which had been already been on-line for about six months before I joined and was growing rapidly. cacti_etc reached some 1200 members and at its peak was getting 50+ posts a day. Quite a few UK members, myself included were very active on this Forum. Unfortunately competition from national and specialist forums and mailing lists has now reduced it to a small rather sad rump of its former self. These days there are only 2 or 3 posts a day and I suspect many fewer readers.
The CSSA has gone down a rather different route with a Wiki like system which I am not convinced will work and has nothing comparable to the BCSS Forum which is I think the largest and most active UK Langauge Forum. It would be good for the Forum and the BCSS if we can encourage the international aspects to grow and develop as much as possible.

[Hob]

Daiv Freeman runs a great international forum at cactiguide.com with members from all over the world

it can be found here

cactiguide forum index

[Julie]

I'm all for talking with folks from overseas. Of all the forums I post on, this is the one with the smallest proportion international members.

The internet is wonderful for meeting new people. I've travelled, camped, visited, hostelled with people I've met who I share a love of something with. Everybody gains!

Not met a real life cactus or succulent lover yet! Apart from the chap I bought my gymno from, who I talked to for some time. He said that he had no boy forbies for sale as he could not bear to part with them... I felt... someone understands!

Hmm.. how can we attract people from all over?

[Tim Corbeel]

Julie Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> > Hmm.. how can we attract people from all over?


I learned about this forum, when someone on a belgian forum posted a topic about the BCSS forum.

[Colin Walker]

Hi Tony,

A problem with cacti_etc is that it's not moved with the times and still looks the same and functions as it did 8-9 years ago when I first joined. I've not posted anything there for a few years now. I maintain my subscription because the occasional snippet of news, such as the death of some famous, does get posted there first.

[bcss]

Colin's probably correct in the reasons for the decline in cacti_etc. Part of this is general change from mailing lists to forums. There were also a number of fairly serious bust-ups which saw prominent posters leaving the list. Mailing lists (and before them Newsgroups) worked well with dial-up internet connection where you connected to the internet, downloaded messages, answered off-line and then uploaded responses at a leter time. A BCSS mailing list predated this forum but it never really took off. Forums are much better adapted to always-on broad-band connections, but remember these are not always accesible to everyone. We have only had a broadband connection for just over a year being too far from our telephone exchange previously. It is very easy to assume that how you see the internet is the same everyone else does. It the parable of the seven blind men and the elephant again.

[Apicra]

I'm sure we all support future development of this BCSS Forum. It has the strengths of being in English (the international language), being associated with the Cactus Mall (the best cactus info portal) and being backed by one of the larger cactus societies (the BCSS).

But future growth will be slow just waiting for people to come here, without more effort. I think some cross-advertising would be appropriate, now that the Forum has reached a critical mass and has a good number of posts each day. Adverts should be placed in cactus journals and other likely places. This begs the question: what would an advert for the Forum look like? Why would anyone new want to participate?

Our greatest strength is probably cultivation advice, but therein lies a paradox: cultivation is different in different countries and climates, so this may not have strong international appeal.

Any ideas what a small advert could say?

Best wishes,
Derek Tribble,
London, UK

[Nick]

What about the "adverts on the right hand side of a Google search?" Sorry don`t know what the correct name for these are but I think they can be cheap, and numbers paid for can be limited, so millions of hits need not bust the budget - however they are not free! Everytime anyone googles cactus growing or somesuch, up could come the link to the Cactus Mall/Forum.
I don`t own shares in Google :-))))))))
NIck

[Bill]

Going on the last few days:

[quote]
The BCCS Forum
Cactus & Succulent Discussions.
The friendly Forum (Well mostly friendly, most of the time)
So why not pop in for a chat, but bring your flak jacket just in case.

http://www.bcss.org.uk/forum[/quote]

[tony_lb]

I've just tried Google with various phrases: cactus growing, cactus care, cactus propagation etc and the BCSS site was one of the top 5 hits for each of them. If Google returns BCSS anyway, why pay for clicks? Anyway, the fashion is moving away from Google now to use DogPile instead, and BCSS doesn't come as high in searches there. To get high on a search list, you need to optimise the web pages for the search engine and clearly BCSS is optimised for Google.

What might make sense is to somehow get people via cactus nurseries - after all, not everyone thinks of internet searches as a first step. I've been teaching Computing/IT to secondary school kids for 20 years and many of those don't search on the web, they just ask friends or give up.

Tony