How can we promote Philosophy Stack Exchange?

Question

Now that we're out of private beta, it is very important that we "hit the ground running", so to speak, and increase participation on the site as much as possible.

I've emailed my former classmates and professors, and I'm trying to mention the site to friends, but I've also posted it on Reddit and was hoping if any of you are members of that site, you'd upvote it there so more people will see it. Maybe this is minor karma-whoring, but it's for a good cause :P

• r/AcademicPhilosophy
• r/Philosophy

Does anyone else have any good ideas on how we can promote this site?

If you've already done some things to promote Philosophy Stack Exchange, especially if they're social in any way and could benefit from more people seeing/supporting them, please share them here!

And if anyone has suggestions or knows of specific promotion strategies that they've seen work in the past, please share those as well!

Since it's important that we market the site to new users who are not already part of the Stack Exchange community, does anyone know of any other web sites, bloggers, authors, etc. that we can target?

Our site also has a Twitter feed—@StackPhilosophy. It periodically tweets popular or interesting questions, so please share this and spread the word! We think it's a great way to entice and remind people to visit the site. You should definitely follow us yourself if you use Twitter, and even if you don't, you can add it to another service like Google Reader.

Answer 1

For those of you who haven't seen these meta posts, Stack Exchange has introduced two funding programs for students and people conducting research:

• Stack Exchange Ambassadors is a sponsorship program to help current users organize events, study breaks, etc and spread the word about Philosophy.SE
• The Stack Exchange Fellowship is a funding program for students and professionals doing research that they can talk about on Philosophy.SE

A great way to promote this site would be to spread the word and help us get applicants for these programs (or apply yourself!)

Answer 2

I know this is being somewhat redundant but...

There are a lot of great tools to make this site more accessible to users and to make it easy to share your interest in this site. StackApps is an excellent source for applications / tools that use the API. I will highlight a couple I have written that might be useful for this site:

StackImage 2

If you want to promote this site on your blog / website, be sure to give StackImage 2 a spin. Using the tools there, you can create your own unique 'flair' from scratch. You can drag-and-drop components on to your flair and set their colors / attributes / etc. Here is an example:

http://stackimage2.quickmediasolutions.com/4df92f4057016/philosophy.stackexchange/81?type=image

Note that the above flair is a JPEG image. There are also other options for embedding HTML-based flair as well as a self-updating JavaScript version.

StackApplet

StackApplet is a Linux / Windows application that allows you to monitor your accounts here. It will notify you of reputation changes, new answers to your questions, new comments, as well as a handy way to quickly visit your profile page. The Linux version has been around for a while and the Windows build is still quite new. You can find more information here.

StackMobile.com

StackMobile is a mobile front end to all of the Stack Exchange sites, including this one. I recently fixed the problem that was preventing this site from showing up in the list - you can now find it near the bottom (because it's still relatively new). Using StackMobile, you can view the site on your iPhone/iPod/iPad, Android device, etc. with a sleek mobile interface that is easy to navigate and use.

Answer 3

I think it would be useful to visit different boards and place links--to both existing phil.SE questions and to questions created expressly for this purpose--at the bottom of questions amenable to a philosophical treatment (e.g. "For the philosophical implications of Bell's theorem, please see this phil.SE thread"). This way, phil.SE will be linked to from many popular posts and will fill the present demand for implications-related questions that the respective other boards cannot.

Answer 4

I have publicized the site itself on Twitter and Facebook. I have also been educating the philosophy teachers and students I know about this site.

Getting the word out is critical right now. We're still hovering just slightly above beta levels of visitorship.

Answer 5

A Chat Event!

How about a chat event where our users can meet each other, engage with one another, and maybe even have some fun?

I was thinking one of these chat events could involve the Philosoraptor, who is, uncannily enough, thematically appropriate for the site! Users could make macros and share them with the community (use MS Paint!) through the chat's upload function. They could be actually philosophical, philosophy jokes, or random things like this.

Here's the base: