intothefuzz

Just wanted to share a few links (mostly Mozilla design stuff) that have been populating my tabs lately:

* Alex Faaborg talks about refreshing the Firefox icon…like all his posts, it’s extremely thought-provoking. The comments are interesting, too.

* Looking back a bit, Mary Colvig reports that last year’s amazing Download Day campaign has won a People’s Voice Webby! Great news for a project that was a career highlight for all of us who were a part of it.

* Looking back a bit more, Asa Dotzler has resurrected the classic Hack artwork as a desktop wallpaper.

* David Boswell continues his series of updates on the mozilla.org redesign…so great to see how they’ve involved the community in every step of the process.

* A Kansas information architect named Sean Tevis has created a bit of an online stir this week with his innovative and generally awesome methods for using the web to create a grassroots movement. Check it out because a) his tactics remind me a lot of Mozilla, and include ideas we can learn from, b) there’s a browser reference right at the top of the page and c) cool cartoons!

Ok, this is more about a site redesign Request for Proposal (RFP) rather than an actual redesign, but I still found it pretty interesting (and hilarious).

According to Talking Points Memo, a RFP from the Republican National Committee is circulating around the web, and the public reaction hasn’t been good. First, it leads off with some truly painful corporate jargon (“If it’s going to be ‘outside the box’ – then not only keep it outside the box, but take it to someplace the box hasn’t even reached yet.”) and then follows up with some specifics about…well, there actually aren’t really any specifics.

Also, fans of the open web won’t like this part: “Flash interfaces can often make mundane tasks exciting, and having Flash developers who understand user behavior will make the site more user-friendly.”

Reaction from conservative bloggers has been pretty harsh…comments like “”a masterpiece of confusion and idiocy” and “clueless losers” are being thrown around. Ouch…and I thought the Mozilla audience was tough!

If you’re curious to see for yourself, you can read the full RFP here.

Like a lot of people, I’ve followed U.S. politics pretty obsessively over the past year or so (and in various intense bursts before that), but I’ve tried not to write about it here because a) I want this blog to mainly focus on topics more closely related to Mozilla and b) once I start ranting I have a tendency not to be able to stop.

But, when I saw Barack Obama’s change.gov site last week I had to post a quick comment. It’s been well-documented that his team did an absolutely masterful job of using social media and the full array of Web 2.0 tools to create an entirely new sort of 21st century campaign, and now they’re applying this same approach to his presidential transition efforts. Very cool.

(Side note: I’d love to know when exactly they started building this site…it popped up a couple of days after the election, but I know from personal experience that sites of this quality and scope don’t exactly spring up overnight.)

Anyway, I’m hopeful that Obama and his team will continue this approach once they actually start governing. This could be a truly revolutionary step forward for both the Internet and American politics…Joe Trippi, the pioneer of online grassroots political organizing, says that such a move would make this the most powerful presidency since FDR.

There actually is a slight Mozilla angle to all of this. Never before has there been such a high-profile example of what a well-organized community of people can accomplish. I think having this grassroots/’power to the people’ feeling out there in the zeitgeist will only mean good things for us as we try to spread the word about our own community and its work.

This is awesome…the editing starting at about 1:30 into the clip is so good:

Ever since my post about the Obama car from a few weeks ago, I’ve been noticing homemade Obama signs everywhere. It’s a pretty fascinating phenomenon (to me, at least), and I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say there are some parallels between this and the way the various Mozilla products are created. Grassroots stuff is cool.

Below are a few of my favorite pics; I have more in this Flickr set if you’re interested.

I’ve seen this car a few times while biking home through Oakland and finally stopped yesterday and took some pictures. I love homemade campaign signs (and have seen tons of Obama ones around this spring…an interesting phenomenon):

Close-ups of the car are here and here.

I can’t stop watching this: