Imagine being able to use your rotary dial phone to download a text-only edition of the daily local newspaper right to your home computer in a mere two hours! Sounds impossibly futuristic, right? Well, journey with me back to 1981 and watch this crazy vision become a reality:
All sarcasm aside, it really is amazing to watch this and think about all that’s happened since then. And, of course, to imagine how people 30 years from now will be mocking us for our reliance on primitive technology like “blogs” and “browsers”.
Dave Bottoms just put up a couple of interestingposts about a project he and I have been working on with Mike Morgan, Les Orchard and the folks at Stamen Design. The general goal, as he explained, is to create a visual representation of the Mozilla community using data feeds from sources like Bugzilla, blog posts, Twitter tweets, code check-ins and more.
Thanks to input from the visualization masters at Stamen and lots of heroic work by Mike and Les, we’re off to a good start on this but are looking for help from the community to make it even better.
We have lots of data flowing through Les’ Lizard Feeder already, but need a visual concept to bring it all together. Stamen had a good idea they called “authors vs entries”, which sorts the data by linking individuals with the actions they’ve taken (bug fixes, blog posts, etc). There’s a ton of potential with this, but we haven’t had a chance to flesh it out yet. For reference, here’s a very rough, early-stage prototype Stamen put together to illustrate the concept:
Feeling inspired? Want to take a crack at this? If so, be sure to read Dave’s posts and then comment on the bug with your thoughts. We’re looking forward to seeing what you come up with!
Note: this is the latest in a very slow-moving (the last post was in September) series about Mozilla.com.
When we were redesigning Mozilla.com for the Firefox 3 release, our primary goal for the site was to drive Firefox downloads, but a very strong secondary goal was to do a better job of communicating the rather unique and unconventional nature of Mozilla in general. One way we tried to achieve this was with the fanciful illustrations, but we also created a “What is Mozilla?” page to explain things more directly.
Wiserpeople than I have been pondering this question for years, and if you asked 200 people in the Mozilla community to answer it you’d probably get 200 different answers, so I won’t claim that this page represents the final word on the subject. But, I’m happy with the way it turned out and hope that it helps laypeople who happen across it understand what we’re all about and why we’re different.
When I was writing it, my big breakthrough was realizing that it made more sense to describe Mozilla as many things all at once rather than as a single concept. From there, I drew upon a bunch of Mitchell’s past blog posts to cover the philosophical details behind the main points. The key line is really the last one: that the goal of all aspects of Mozilla is making the Internet better for everyone.
So, that was the approach to explaining Mozilla to the uninitiated. I should also mention that the page has a very handy side benefit: if you’ve ever struggled to give friends/family/acquaintances a simple answer as to what Mozilla is, how we’re both a non-profit and a corporation, and other fun things like that, just direct them to this page. I’ve used that trick several times now and it makes things much easier!
I was looking over our plans for the Community Store launch recently when it occurred to me that it was a pretty textbook example of how we unveil new Web initiatives around here. In this particular case, we were able to spread the word about our new site to a worldwide audience of millions without spending a single dime (really). So, for the benefit of anyone who might be curious about the process I’ll pull back the curtain and share some of our tricks.
Our overall goal is always to get the word out in the most leveraged fashion possible by using the various Web tools at our disposal plus, of course, the power of the Mozilla community. For this particular launch, here are the channels we used:
Friends of Mozilla
* after an inquiry from Tara, the folks who run the t-shirt search engine Teenormous were kind enough to add the Community Store to their index. (Incidentally, definitely check out Teenormous next time you’re t-shirt shopping…it’s a cool service.)
* promotion to the PHUG open source community and students at Seneca College courtesy of Brendan Sera-Shirar.
Partners
* great partner support from the folks at Zazzle US and UK, who blogged about the Store and featured us on variouspages on their sites (right between Star Wars and Barbie on this one).
* a 20% discount to encourage purchases during the holiday shopping season.
Mozilla Channels
* a snippet on the Google start page…one of the most powerful tools at our disposal. Referencing the Community Store here exposes it to millions of people every day.
* prominent linking from places on Mozilla.com, including the homepage and the About menu.
* a blurb in the about:mozilla newsletter, read by the movers & shakers in the Mozilla world.
One thing I know is that when Patrick Finch asks you to do something, you’d better do it. So, in compliance with this ’seven things’ meme that’s been spreading around furiously over the last week, here I go:
The rules:
1. Link to your original tagger and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.
About me:
1. I’m a total trivia nerd (specializing in music trivia), and in 2001 I appeared on (and won) the game show Rock & Roll Jeopardy.
2. I’m originally from Arkansas, which is kind of an uncommon place to be from in the internet industry and/or Mozilla community. Go Hogs!
3. Bad border crossing #1: during a post-high school road trip, I was turned away at the Canadian border. My friends and I were pulled off the road, interrogated and eventually denied access to the country…the official reason being that we didn’t have enough money, but I’m pretty sure they thought we were drug smugglers (we weren’t). The good news is that they let me in for the Summit last summer.
4. Worst bad job: working at the FAO Schwarz in downtown San Francisco for three months in 1996. Best bad job: dressing up in period garb to work as a docent at a historic antebellum mansion in Memphis.
5. This isn’t directly about me, but my wife sings with the San Francisco Opera, which I think is pretty cool. We’re coming up on our 15th anniversary as a couple (dating back to this era)…a fact that kind of blows my mind.
6. Bad border crossing #2: my (future) wife and I were pulled off a train at the Italian/Swiss border by guards wielding guns and German Shepherds. We were detained in a small room at the border station for more than an hour while they completely took apart our bags and yelled at us in Italian. Once again they thought we were drug smugglers (and once again, we weren’t).
7. I (sporadically) play bass in a rockband. We’re all old guys with lots of other things going on so we don’t do it as often as we’d like, but we’ve had our moments. (This post has a couple of MP3s up if you’re curious.)
Your turn:
1. Alex Faaborg, because reading his blog posts is like taking a really good college class in UE design.
2. Jane Finette, because she can effortlessly drop words like “cheeky” and “chuffed” into the flow of conversation.
3. Steven Garrity, because he makes my job easier almost every day (and does cool podcasts).
4. Mike Morgan, because he’s a hell of a ping pong player.
5. Johnathan Nightingale, because he’s such a passionate supporter of the rights of the bearded.
6. David Rolnitzky, because he’s trying to increase his search engine rank.
7. Justin Scott, because he needs a boost after watching LSU lose to Arkansas two years in a row.
As Mozilla's Creative Director I work on Firefox branding, websites and other marketingish things. The intent of this blog is to cover all that and a little bit more.
