Re: advertising a booth at a meeting

Posted by Gabriel Lapointe on
URL: http://confocal-microscopy-list.275.s1.nabble.com/Micro-Manager-at-the-ASCB-meeting-tp1627182p1632116.html

To add my grain of salt in the already long discussion on advertising I
must first congratulate most of the representative of the industry
following the list for their self discipline. I personally think that
advertising new technology, workshop, conference and the like in an
informative manner is a plus to this list.

Not everyone is regularly approached by those “annoying” sales
representative with their new product, some company can develop a new
technology but don't have the money to publicize it world wide. That new
technology can be of interest to someone who searched for it six month
ago but is just now available.

However there are limits. Obviously I wouldn't want all small local
workshop that happen to University X OR Y to be announced as it would
just render the list unreadable. Neither would it be acceptable for a
company to advertise their Christmas sales here. I also have a strong
bias toward open source software/hardware and thus I personnaly think
that they should have more latitude in informing others in their
evolution. The other important thing is that events advertised should be
punctual (i.e. annual or less frequent). I know how hard it is to
organize international events and how hard it is to sometime get new
(i.e. were not there the previous year) participants.

In this, I think I agree with miss Dowling that the bi-weekly Compucytes
"workshop" are indeed spam. And I can understand the frustration, of
those who are playing by the unwritten rules and don't spam the list
with all their recurring events, when they see those advertisement. Her
reaction was of course a bit harsh and hit the wrong target. I bet if
she had put a more detailed reply after the right message she would have
gotten more support then criticism.

Since we are mostly professional on the list, those spam are fortunately
very rare. But a question arise: when will we have to draw a line
between auto-regulation and strict control? I think as long as thread
like this one happens once in a while to reminds people to be careful,
else the unwritten rules will be written and enforced and everyone will
loose, we will have a statu-quo.

Now, it is impossible to please everyone and I can also understand those
who want the list to be completely commercial free. Maybe a way to
improve things a bit is to put tag in front of titles. The
“commercial/vendor response” is a good start, but it could be extended
by adding something like:
[events]
[ads]
[workshop]
[job offer]

If you don't want to see those it is easy to filter them out.

Again I encourage those with commercial interest to continue their good
work in a self discipline manner.

Gabriel Lapointe