Lately I've been hearing criticism here and there about the PSF and python.org and marketing. In summary: people think they aren't marketing Python well.

Anything with "Python" in its name can't market Python well. python.org isn't going to sell anyone on Python. Maybe it can seal the deal for someone who is almost entirely convinced. But in a time when languages and platforms are seen as partisan a primary source is no good for marketing.

So: python.org is nice, I like the redesign. I think further work on the site should be focus on usability, and hence mostly on the documentation. And if you want to market Python then please please please don't do it on python.org, because even if you have to make up a entirely new blog that no one reads in order to get your story out, it will still be more useful than putting material on python.org. I guess you could then put it on planetpython.org; that should really get aggregated onto the front page somehow -- but no, I'm falling into the exact line of thought I'm trying to get people away from. The point of putting it on planetpython.org isn't so that it might show up on python.org, but so that other people will read it and pass it around.

Just about everyone who uses Python has a secondary goal. Actually, they all have a primary goal, which Python allows them to accomplish. That goal might be "sell out my company" or "manage gene information" or "have some fun" or "come home after work and program in a non-soul-killing language". And each person has a community that has nothing to do with Python, but may understand or appreciate that goal that led you to Python. Those are the people you should be telling about Python. Or about Plone, or Django, or wxPython, or GStreamer, or whatever other thing you are doing.

I bet there's a lot of people out there who are interested in marketing who haven't even sufficiently informed their own coworkers of how they are using Python. How crazy is that? Why would you start out telling the whole world what you are doing before you tell the person right next to you.

Those institutions with "Python" in their name shouldn't worry about marketing. The members of those institutions should think about it and work on it; but the institution should focus on making Python useful and usable, and keeping Python users happy and connected, and facilitating individual's efforts.