bart's blog

Of, By and For live event

Tomorrow's the first live event for a site I'm helping to produce, Of, By and For. Mitch Kapor will be in conversation with Joe Trippi. Of, By and For uses the same technology platform as Spread Firefox, a community platform called CivicSpace (based on Drupal). Of By and For was designed by Chris Messina, who also designed Spread Firefox.

We're using the Darwin Streaming Server for the audio streaming and open source PHP-based chat software called ARSC ("A Really Simple Chat"). We should be able to accomodate >500 simultaneous connections and as many people in a single chat room. Of course, we're not expecting that many people. It's amazing how easy (and cheap!) it is to run these sorts of events.

I'm curious to see how glitch-free this audio stream + text chat event will be. If things go well tomorrow, I'd love to help organize Radio Mozilla, periodic live audio events + online chat sessions.

Proposal for changes to mozilla.org homepage

Hi everyone,

It's been a couple of weeks now since the new web site went live. Enough time to collect feedback from different groups of people and step back a bit. While we have received a lot of positive feedback, legitimate concerns have been raised about the lack of a real feedback cycle for the new homepage and about the way in which developer content was relegated off the homepage.

It has also been rightly pointed out that I, in particular, have been delinquent in articulating any kind of statement as to what the marketing plan for Mozilla is. I am working on a blog post on this topic - expect to see that over the next few days.

Meanwhile, I wanted to articulate my personal opinion about what the mission of the homepage should be and make a proposal for a few changes to the homepage. I'd like to receive feedback on both of these issues.

I believe that the primary purposes of the mozilla.org homepage should be (1) to generate Firefox downloads and (2) to direct people to the information they are looking for on our site. Secondary purposes should be (1) to promote additional key products (primarily Thunderbird), (2) to provide the latest Mozilla news, (3) to encourage people to get involved with Mozilla, (4) to highlight what's going on in our developer community and (5) to highlight blog posts by key Mozilla contributors. In addition, as part of our sponsorship agreement with the Mozilla Store, we are required to promote Mozilla merchandise in a prominent way from our homepage. Let me elaborate on each of these items:

* Promoting Firefox downloads: Firefox is our most important weapon in our drive to spread Gecko user agent strings, which is our mission as an organization. We are about preserving standards, choice and innovation on the web. In order to achieve this mission, we must have a critical mass of users, so that web developers will build web sites to standards, not to a specific browser. Firefox has captured the attention of opinion leaders, the mainstream press, and millions of users. Firefox is allowing us to reverse 5 years+ of ever-increasing monopolization of the browser space. So we are promoting downloads not because we think Firefox is cool, but because right now Firefox is our best weapon for achieving our mission. Millions of users are visiting our web site each month, and we have to offer them a simple, easy-to-understand homepage that allows them to easily understand why they should get Firefox, and how they can get it.
* Directing people to the information they are looking for. That's what the navbar, the search box, and the links in each of the feature boxes are about.
* Promoting additional key products: Thunderbird is very important to our future and we should promote it.
* Providing the latest Mozilla news: to share important information with the people who visit our site.
* Encouraging people to get involved with Mozilla: Mozilla is a community endeavor and encouraging people to get involved is hugely important. Anyone can contribute: hackers, testers, bugzilla volunteers, marketing volunteers.
* Highlight what's going on in our developer community: Mozilla wouldn't be anywhere without our community of developers so we need to spotlight what's going on in this community.
* Blog posts: blog posts show how dynamic our community is and provide a behind the scenes look into the open source process. Constantly updated blog posts give readers a reasons to keep coming back to our site.
* Mozilla 1.7: I believe that featuring Mozilla 1.7 on our homepage as we get to the 1.0 milestone for Firefox and Thunderbird is counter-productive, for the simple reason that it is almost impossible to explain to people that Mozilla 1.7 is not the same as Firefox + Thunderbird. Believe me, I've tried explaining this. Just a few days ago, Chris and I spent 20 minutes explaining this to an influential reporter who was quite familiar with Mozilla. He got confused. Even if we were able to succinctly communicate the difference between the suite and Firefox/Thunderbird, it would still be counter-productive to expose users to two competing choices on our homepage. In sum, I believe that we need to continue to maintain and update Seamonkey, but the homepage of mozilla.org is not the best place to promote it.

Proposal for changes:

* Announcements > Mozilla News: the current announcements box is too static. It should become a Mozilla News box that lists both official Mozilla announcements and other important Mozilla news, which could come from MozillaZine, MozillaNews, high profile press stories etc. We already have an aggregator on Spread Firefox that can be used to program this box.
* Improved Mozilla Weblogs: We should make sure that only Mozilla-related posts are featured here, and allow posters to flag a post as "donotfeature". We have this infrastructure in place and ready to go from Spread Firefox.
* Mozilla 1.7.3 box > Get Involved box, around 1.0 RC launch. The new Get Involved box would include links to (1) getting involved as a developer, (2) filing bugs, (3) testing, (4) helping to spread Firefox. We may not have 4 links in that little box, but whatever links we do have should offer information about each of these ways in which people can get involved. In support of this box, a few developer-oriented pages may need updating (how to contribute, how to file bugs, how to join the QA team, how to join Evangelism...).
* MozillaZine box > Developer Spotlight. Links to important developer-related news and new resources. For example, a link to the Roadmap, new developer documentation, policy changes, an important blog post by a key contributor.

Please provide your ideas on all of the above!

Regards,

Bart

Proposed changes to mozilla.org homepage - MozillaZine Forums

Looking for CC licensed tunes

Head on over to this post and let me know if you have suggestions.

Testing changes to Mozilla.org featured blog posts

We have set up a system to allow bloggers to exclude their posts from being featured on the Mozilla.org homepage on a per-post basis, and we also have a post-publication moderation mechanism.

- If your posts are listed on Planet.mozilla.org and you'd like to exclude one of your posts from being featured on the Mozilla.org homepage, add the following invisible HTML comment to your post:
<!--donotfeature-->. Please exercise judgment when deciding whether a post should be featured on our homepage.

- If an inappropriate post shows up on the Mozilla.org homepage, you'll be able to send mail to myself and several other folks and we'll moderate it off the homepage.

- If you haven't already done so, please make sure that only Mozilla related posts get syndicated to Planet.mozilla.org.

- We'll see how this new system works out. If we continue to get complaints, we may move to a pre-publication screening system for the homepage items (not for planet itself of course) or create a separate feed for the items that are featured on the homepage.

- Help us test the new feed for the homepage items: you can view it at Spreadfirefox. The XML feed is here.

Let me know if see any problems with the new feed.

USA Today, then WSJ (again)

Great plug for Firefox in USA Today yesterday. Today, Walter Mossberg, arguably the most influential tech writer, put in a nice plug for Firefox in his WSJ Mailbox Column. A blogger kindly republished the relevant portion.

my aggregated blog

I now have four different weblogs, which is annoying for me, and makes it hard for people (really, just Mom, probably) to track everything I'm writing.

So I decided to set up an aggregator for my various blogs. I wasn't in the mood to set up Drupal for this small project, so looked around for an aggregator plugin for Movable Type.

I couldn't find one but came across a 2002 script called Blagg, which is supposed to also work in conjunction with Movable Type. I spent an hour or so trying to get that to work and then decided to try out the blog app that Blagg was developed for, a blogging system called Blosxom that was developed in 2002 at O'Reilly. 30 minutes later, here's my aggregated blog. Not bad. The theme looks kind of 1999. Very retro. I'll make something nicer lately. The weirdest thing is that all the datestamps are screwed up. A quick Google search shows that this problem takes us into the oddities and imperfections of the RSS specs, something I don't want to know about. So I'll just follow the lead of another blogger who encountered this problem and decided to solve it by running a crontab to generate new entries once a day, and just live with the fact that the first batch all share the same, wrong, datestamp.

All in all, I'm very happy with how this has turned out.

Bart, in the aggregate

103,000 Firefox links

Blake just pointed out that
103,000 pages now link to the Firefox products page. 190,000 link to the Mozilla.org homepage.

It looks like Google.com updates the links numbers once a month or so. Last time we looked, there were 78,000-odd links.

- Google.com: 2,410,000
- Mozilla.org: 190,000
- Microsoft.com: 121,000
- Firefox product page: 103,000
- Apple.com: 68,100
- Opera.com: 63,200
- IE homepage: 61,400
- Netscape.com: 55,300