I jumped the gun a little bit and made this post on Reddit in /r/bicycling to announce our Private Beta, but I justified it because there had been previous posts in the community asking folks to commit early on.
What other means should we use to promote bicycles.stackexchange once we go public?
I would recommend checking out the cooking.meta post here; they pulled together a list of popular cooking blogs and other resources and generated an email campaign for a lateral distribution (rather than a top down like reddit, digg, etc.). If everyone pitched in and started an email campaign, or as they recommend just put together a generated chain (from their post) a la:
[Dear whoever],
[EDIT ME SO I AM AN IMPRESSIVE LETTER TO SEND TO A RESPECTABLE WEBSITE.]
[Sincerely],
[Us]
This might be a good model for the betas going public.
I constructed a variant on Dave's cooking letter. Please feel free to edit if you have a better way of wording this, and I'll post to BikeForums, Crazyguy, and Cyclingforums later today. (Please don't do too much in the way of formatting, I'll have to translate this into BBcode to post.)
My goal here is to show how this site complements traditional discussion boards, and complements them.
I'd like to introduce the members of this board to a new website tentatively titled Bicycling. This site is a free Q & A site, and we're aiming to cover cycling in all forms. It's free to ask questions, free to answer questions, and free to read.
The site is run by us, the community. It is collaboratively built and maintained by fellow bicycling enthusiasts. Once the system learns to trust you, you'll be able to edit anything, much like Wikipedia.
This isn't a site to discuss things, this is a site where you can ask questions that have (ideally) a single answer, or at least a single best answer.
Our goal is to become the go-to internet location for expert answers to objective questions. This requirement that questions be objective helps maintain the quality and expert appeal of our site. You won't ever have to dig through tons of questions like "what bike should I get ..." that are better suited for the discussion format of boards like this.
Here are a few examples of the questions that have been asked and answered on our site:
Please stop by and check us out. It doesn't matter if you're a beginner or an experienced cyclist, you are most certainly welcome. We want the community to expand! We need people to ask and answer the most basic of questions as well as the most advanced, esoteric questions.
We look forward to seeing new faces!
Bike Forums and Crazy Guy on a Bike are the two that come to mind. I can do these two when the time comes.
Anyone here active on Cycling Forums?
