Six Degrees to a Dingoo explosion!

I often get emails from Dingoo users who wish they could help – but they can’t code.  Well, coding is important, but there are other ways to help.  At this stage in the product’s life, there’s no point learning Linux if you can’t tell the difference between Ubuntu and Ebola.  Leave it to the experts, and wait for the inevitable Idiot’s Guide Release version, which should be coming soon.

You don’t get off the hook for being command-line illiterate though. No.  I’m sure the dude above had a good excuse for not turning up at the Somme – maybe he had no right arm after the elbow, and so couldn’t fire a rifle -  but that’s not stopping him from a pensive rumination, is it? He’s in the zone, thinking, as should you be: “What have I done? What can I do!?”

The same thoughts have troubled me. Sure, I mutilate classic war posters, crack the odd funny, and spend an inordinate amount of time cutting and pasting, but when the chips are down, and the cliches exhausted, how have I really helped our little block of joy claim its rightful place in this world?  I mean, try this for an experiment: tell the first person you speak to at work or at school or wherever you go first tomorrow, that you enjoy playing with your Dingoo and that you’ve been so happy since the release of Dingux.  Are they going to reply:

(A) “Yeeeeah! My life is complete!” , or

(B) “Yeeesh! Gross!”?

And here lies the problem. Dingux or not, the scene will die one day, because let’s face it, it’s never going to hit the level of developer support we all crave unless many many many more units are sold. Empirically, as this scholarly example of the statistician’s art demonstrates, the Dingoo is just a couple of hundred million units of sales short of the Nintendo DS or PSP – both of which are actually respectable, and more importantly, as common as toasters - why not dream that the Dingoo can one day rival them for even one tenth of their ubiquity?  What can we do to get it up there? 

We can of course sell lemonade at school fetes, and put posters on bus stops and stuff like that, but we really need is a quick, lazy and devastatingly effective mode of spreading the word that Dingoo is the way we are feelin’.

Fortunately, I have the answer, and it is simple, and the results, unbelievable though it may today seem, are inevitable. (And you don’t have to click anywhere to buy something, either!) Why?

Because, as we all know, each and every one of us is connected to Kevin Bacon, by six or fewer degrees of separation. I, for instance, know a lady who used to date a guy who worked on the art in Con Air, who knew Nicholas Cage, who has a Bacon Index of 2 – which means I just make it, but it also means I can’t just ring either Nick or Kev for a quick plug.  However, it must be that among you good people, is someone who actually knows him well enough to get him to say something publicly like: “I love playing with my Dingoo (and by the way, check out www.dingoo-scene.com)”

Actually, I’m not proud – so anyone with a public profile will do. Are you Berlusconi’s gardener, and don’t know what you want to extract from those incriminating Polaroids? Perhaps you’re a Malawian Judge, and Madonna owes you. Or maybe the next time you visit your Uncle Benedict at St Peters, he’ll just do it as you were always his favourite!  Think creatively and laterally!  There’s no need to limit yourself to politicians or movie stars.  Heck, if you’re Dan Rutter’s vet, Tom Pabst’s mechanic, Cory Doctorow’s editor, or Ken Rockwell’s accountant, any of them would be a coup!  And they don’t even have to be Western, or speak English either – we get visitors – and so, potential publicity – from all over the world here!

So there you have it. Your mission, Acolytes of Dingoo Pleasure, is to get someone, anyone, with any bit of fame, to publicly promote the Dingoo.  There is only one rule: the act of promotion must be published in some form somewhere, or at least a picture taken, so that you can post the link or proof here, and claim the bragging rights.

Over to you then, the people, the power!