Blake posted a call for marketing ideas today and is already generating good ideas. Looks like his blog post may become the focal point of these marketing discussions. Pretty exciting.
OB4.org went up today. It's a blog site that Mitch, Joe, myself and a few others plan to use for our conversations about what we can learn from the Dean campaign, MoveOn.org, Ohmynews and other shining examples of the power of Net to help bring about democratic reform. Should be interesting.
The other part that's interesting is the technology we're using for OB4: a version of Drupal under development at CivicSpace Labs. I'm now running blogs using three different setups: Movable Type (this blog), Scoop (Foreign Substance) and Drupal/CivicSpace (OB4.org). It's amazing to see how versatile all of these tools are (especially Scoop and Drupal), and I'm looking forward to discovering the relative strengths and limitations of the different platforms.
Firefox 0.9 has shipped. It's another amazing release. We've clearly got the best browser out there, and we're building a lot of momentum. At least 3 million people downloaded Firefox 0.8, and we estimate that there are at least that many users. To put that in perspective: the user base of Firefox has tripled over the last six months, and more people are now downloading Firefox than Mozilla 1.x releases. If we keep the current growth rate going, there'll be 30 million Firefox users a year from now. And research shows that Firefox users leave a big footprint on the web: we are a very active bunch of people, and feature disproportionately in the logs of popular web sites.
Now is the time to build on that momentum and get more people to try out Firefox, for a couple of reasons. First of all, the software is now feature complete, has a shiny new theme and lots of bug fixes and other improvements (Gecko is now 9% faster than when Firefox 0.8 came out, for instance). With 0.9, migrating from IE is a breeze (passwords, cookies, bookmarks are all brought over). Last but not least, with the new update notification, users will be alerted when the next version of Firefox comes out.
So what's needed? It's time for those of us who are not engineers to lend a hand. Help us promote Firefox by putting one of those cute buttons on your web site, point all of your friends to GetFirefox.com, or chime in with your ideas for how we can best tap into the collective energy of the millions of Mozilla fans (submit your suggestions as a comment below).
It's time to take back the web!