new user - how to get by?

[szabgab]

I am new in DW and used LJ only once so I have no idea where to find things and how to do things here.

Following the recommendation of damned_colonial I got on the #dw IRC channel and asked about it. I got a link to this getting_started community, to dreamchasers, and to support.

So I am posting here wondering how do you start using DW? How do you find people to answer your questions if there is no community yet with your interests?

Comments

I have a specific question

[szabgab]

I have a specific question as outlined in my journal: programmable robots for children. How can I get people to look at that and to answer my question?

Re: I have a specific question

[zvi]

Most of the time, people don't subscribe to someone's journal for a single question, but because they think the person will write interesting entries or host interesting discussions.

One community you would probably be interested in that I forgot, dreamchasers, which is specifically for telling people about you and why they should subscribe to your journal.

Re: I have a specific question

[cesy]

As zvi said, getting an answer to a single question is not normally how it starts.

You'll sometimes see people posting questions like that and getting answers, but it's usually because they've already got a large circle of readers who they've built up a relationship with, or because there's an active community discussing related topics. (e.g. synecdochic, damned_colonial or cleolinda could ask any random question and someone would probably answer, but that's because they've got a lot of regular readers from a fairly wide range of backgrounds. Most people who are active in the community could ask any question related to the topics they normally blog about, or that their readers tend to be interested in - e.g. zarhooie and yvi have recently asked about knitting and got useful answers, and rho asked about software for Macs.)

Dreamwidth, as a social media site, tends to be somewhere half-way between blogging and social networking, rather than something like Yahoo! Answers where complete strangers will answer questions without any other prompting.