Rhian stopped by the other day to show off Austin, the first baby ever born to a (female) Mozilla employee. Kind of a cool milestone for the company…

Last fall, I did a short blog post about how we created a “Powered by Mozilla” logo for use by organizations whose products are based on Mozilla technology, and was pleasantly surprised at the level of interest that it received. The only problem was that my original post left pretty much all of the key details, like what it actually means to be “powered by”, unresolved.

We haven’t forgotten about this, though, and lately Harvey Anderson, Paul Kim, Tiffney Mortensen and I have been working on an initial framework of how the “powered by” program might work. Tiffney has a much more thorough explanation of our thoughts so far over at her blog, but the general idea is to set some basic criteria for whether or not a product is truly powered by Mozilla, and then let the community enforce (for lack of a better word) these standards. We very much want this to be a community project, and broad participation is essential to making it work.

Our thoughts so far are definitely just a first step, and we’re counting on community participation to refine and improve them. For lots more info on all this, plus some suggestions on how you can get involved, be sure to check out Tiffney’s post on the subject.

As noted in an earlier post, we’ve coined the term “100% organic software” to help explain Mozilla to people who don’t know what open source is or might not understand why a small public benefit organization is competing with some of the world’s richest and most powerful companies.

This term is very much aimed at a broader audience that probably doesn’t understand the history and nuances of the Mozilla Project, so we like the idea of using a simple, non-technical concept to convey something that’s actually quite complex. If the browsers made by our corporate competitors are like food from factory farms, it’s easy to imagine Firefox as the organic equivalent…tastier, more nutritious, and ultimately better for the world at large.

Of course, the bottom line is that people usually choose Firefox because it’s a better browser rather than because of our unconventional structure, so we’re not planning on making ‘100% organic’ our primary promotional focus. But, from a branding perspective I think it’s important for people to understand what Mozilla is all about, and how that plays a key role in making Firefox the way it is. The browser market will only get more intense, so it’s important for us to establish a clear identity…cool new features are easily copied, but I don’t see our competitors becoming open source, non-profit organizations any time soon.

To help flesh our this concept, we’ve created a new landing page on Mozilla.com. It’s currently linked to from some new banner ads, and will also be referenced on the soon-to-be live updated homepage when it’s ready. Here’s a quick screen shot, but if you’re interested it’s definitely worth checking out the full page too:

In honor of the recent explosion of Ken Kovash posts, I present some Ken Kovash facts (with thanks/apologies to chucknorrisfacts.com)

* Time waits for no man. Unless that man is Ken Kovash.
* Ken Kovash can win a game of Connect Four in only three moves.
* Ken Kovash can divide by zero.
* When taking the SAT, write “Ken Kovash” for every answer. You will score over 8000.
* Ken Kovash has the greatest poker face of all time. He won the 1983 World Series of Poker, despite holding only a Joker, a Get out of Jail Free Monopoly card, a 2 of clubs, 7 of spades and a green #4 card from the game UNO.
* On his birthday, Ken Kovash randomly selects one lucky child to be thrown into the sun.
* Ken Kovash ordered a Big Mac at Burger King, and got one.
* The only thing we have to fear is fear itself… The only thing fear has to fear is Ken Kovash.
* When Ken Kovash exercises, the machine gets stronger.
* Ken Kovash refers to himself in fourth person.
* Ken Kovash was sending an email one day, when he realized that it would be faster to run.
* Jesus owns and wears a bracelet that reads, “WWKKD?”
* The phrase “Made by Ken Kovash” is imprinted beneath the surface of China.
* People say the truth hurts, but it hurts a hell of a lot more when it comes from Ken Kovash.
* Ken Kovash CAN believe it’s not butter.
* It takes Ken Kovash 20 minutes to watch 60 Minutes.
* Firefox crop circles are Ken Kovash’s way of telling the world that sometimes corn needs to lie down.
* Ken Kovash counted to infinity - twice.
* Ken Kovash sleeps with a night light. Not because Ken Kovash is afraid of the dark, but the dark is afraid of Ken Kovash.
* Ken Kovash doesn’t read books. He stares them down until he gets the information he wants.
* Ken Kovash is allowed to talk about Fight Club.
* If at first you don’t succeed, you are obviously not Ken Kovash.

After many months of hard work by a variety of parties, the new Spread Firefox has finally arrived (in beta form…the full-on launch will follow before long). Although there’s still more to be done, we all feel like this is a big step forward for SFx and our open source marketing efforts.

The big change is that the new SFx is based around projects rather than blog posts, with the hope that this will inspire a lot of great ideas and collaboration among our worldwide community. Rhian has more details on how it all works.

Also, those of us in the Mozilla marketing department will soon be conducting the great majority of our business here…the goal being to be as open and transparent as possible. So, if you’re interested in what we’re working on - and even better, if you’re interested in helping out - stop by the new SFx regularly.

From a visual perspective, we tried to create an easily updatable, modular design that would support the projects concept as well as surface features like our events calendar, stats, user photos and more. The key challenge was structuring the site in a way that would expose as many different ways to get involved as possible. We worked primarily with Henry Brown, who did a nice job pulling all the disparate elements together without things getting too out of hand.

A mockup of the ‘non member’ state of the homepage is below (here’s the ‘returning member’ state)…both are slightly different from the live version, but we hope to get it all matched up soon. Lastly, if anyone knows how to get in touch with the two dudes featured at the top of the page, please let me know…we have some Firefox swag waiting for them!

Distilled down to the basics, the goal of the Mozilla marketing department is to help people understand, adopt and continue using Firefox (as a means of supporting Mozilla’s overall mission).

To help achieve that goal, we’ve created a short messaging document (beta version…this is still a work in progress) that covers how we’ll be communicating the benefits of Firefox to the consumer audience (in other words, people who use the Internet regularly for email, shopping, news, etc but aren’t familiar with its technical workings…communicating about Firefox to our technical audience - and I suspect that’s about 95% of the people reading this blog - is an entirely different task, so if these points seem obvious to you, keep that in mind).

Obviously there are dozens of benefits that we could cover, but in the interest of making our communications as tight and to the point as possible, we chose to focus on three main points of differentiation between Firefox and the other guys. Our thinking here is that cool features, like spell check or session restore, don’t stay unique to Firefox for very long, so we wanted to go with topics that we can “own” without them being easily copied or duplicated:

1. Security: Because of well-known problems like identity theft, the issue of online security is very important to most web users. Although no browser is invulnerable, we believe that our open source process makes Firefox the safest way to browse the Internet, and this is a critical message for people to hear.

2. Customization: Many casual web users aren’t really aware of add-ons and all the possibilities they present. So, we want to educate people that web browsing doesn’t have to be a “one size fits all” experience.

3. 100% Organic Software: Working for the public benefit rather than profits is a pretty powerful concept, so want we want people to understand that this is what Firefox is all about. Because the history and structure of Mozilla is, well, a little dense, we like the idea of using this inherently non-technical metaphor to sum up our open source, not-for-profit nature.

This document can best be described as a beta release, and we’ll surely be refining it over time, so your comments and suggestions are encouraged. Even better, put these to the test on your less tech-savvy family/friends/co-workers, etc and share your findings. What are their current perceptions of web browsers? What do they look for when they choose a browser (and do they even know there’s a choice)? And do they find security, customization and 100% organic to be compelling points in favor of Firefox?

If this topic interests you, definitely check out these links:
* The complete Firefox messaging document
* A similar document about Mozilla (rather than just Firefox) explained on Melissa Shapiro’s blog
* Spread Firefox post with more information on both docs

(btw, I’ll be out of the office for about a week and a half starting tomorrow, so if you have questions, thoughts or comments about any of this just post them here and we can discuss further when I return)

At John Lilly’s request, we’ve created a new “Powered by Mozilla” logo. The idea is that companies that use Mozilla technology as the basis for what they do would proudly display this logo on their sites (or wherever it’s most relevant).

I’m happy about this because I think it will do two good things for our brand: 1) help differentiate Mozilla from Firefox (among the broader audience, there’s still some confusion around this) and 2) further establish us as an organization working on the cutting edge of a lot of cool new technology (again, beyond just being “the Firefox guys”).

Thanks to Alicia Patterson for putting this together for us.

High fashion comes to Mountain View: David, JT and Seth do their best Blue Steel poses and show off some potential new caps that we’re considering adding to the Mozilla Store. Which one do you like best? (the caps, not the models)

A candid photo of Internet superstar Asa Dotzler eating chips, drinking coffee and spinning tall tales on the couch in my/David’s office.

I’m not really so into the idea of posting pictures of myself in this blog, but the t-shirt shipment came addressed to me and I was the first person to wear one, so…

Anyway, here’s the latest Mozilla shirt, this time for Rock Your Firefox. I really like the way it turned out. Lee Tom did a great job putting a new twist on his original Rock Your Firefox art…I’ll definitely be wearing this one a lot.

Update 9/18/07: Added a new photo featuring me and Paul. We didn’t plan this, I promise.