In November, The Register revealed that 47% of its readership chose Firefox over other browsers.  El Reg seemed rather proud of this aspect of its audience, apparently we exhibit “a certain technical savvy you won’t find in the general population”.  Well, quite.

But are Register readers the savviest demographic out there?  Or can they be bested?  Do you admininster a site with more than 47% (or can you come close)?   We put together a group on SpreadFirefox where you can show off.

A few ground rules:

• Your site should have its own domain name (you own a .org, .com, .se, .cn etc).
• You should not have an official association with Mozilla (other than being an affiliate, of course!).
• You don’t break any laws or violate any rights by sharing this data.
• We do this for honour and glory, i.e. no cheating and, uh, no prizes.
• No adult content (if you aren’t sure…send it to me and I will check it out in the privacy of my own office).

Also, I have to give a special mention to Erick Leon Bolinaga, who is a student at the Universidad de las Ciencias Informaticas in Havana (UCI has around 13,000 students).  He has been spreading Firefox at his university, and his blog, “Firefoxmania” gets a whopping  66.8% of Firefox traffic.  Unfortunately, it is only available to members of the unversity, so The Register can breathe easy…for now.

But if you can down The Register’s score, please do visit SpreadFirefox and display your wares!

Lots of great coverage of Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 in the press today.  It’s almost hard to cast one’s mind back to a time when there was no such thing as a browser market, but it really is not that long ago.

Liverpool Fans in Athens, May 2007 (feltonf on Flickr)

3.1 Beta 2 has been declared JavaScript Speed Champion, and as Technologizer notes, 2009 is going to be a great year for browser fans.

If you clicked on this, it’s quite probable that you want such a thing.  When I joined Mozilla, one of the first items Jane and I discussed was the need to help the community do as much of its own marketing as possible.  One of the most inspiring things about Mozilla is the energy and enthusiasm: it is the antidote to the oft-repeated and jaded view that open source software is only about money: many people want other people to use Firefox because it is good software that is good for them.

Shortly after I joined Mozilla, Alba, who is a good friend of mine, contacted me to tell me she had taken part in the Firefox Download Day world record attempt.  We had never spoken about Firefox before, but I think it’s likely that if Alba is motivated to join that campaign, there are other things should would like to do to spread good software.

Now, in Europe, we are a diverse bunch of people.  Culturally, we tend to consume our own first, American culture second, and other European culture third.  The exception to this is the Russian diaspora in former Eastern Block countries, which partly goes to explain Russia’s impressive showing in the Eurovision Song Contest (with all due respect to the talents of Dima Bilan and Serebro).  But the point is, marketing Mozilla software to these countries requires more than just a translation of talking points.  It requires an understanding the culture.  We held a discussion on this topic at MozillaCamp Europe, and David Ascher made the very strong point that “localising” amounts to far more than translating.

James Surowiecki never watched the Eurovision Song Contest

So for me there are two purposes to creating a guide to Mozilla Community Marketing.  For one thing, Community Marketing is big.  Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is.  We need a Hitch Hikers’ Guide to Mozilla Community Marketing: to all the different sites, information, resources, projects and teams that are out there.

And while the stories of disastrous attempts at cross-cultural marketing are typically urban legends (the Chevy Nova sold just fine in Mexico), we need to give people freedom - as much freedom as possible - to market Mozilla software in their way.  In the way that makes sense for where they live, for what they do.  Naturally, this has to be done responsibly: Mozilla needs to make sure anything “official” is accurate and honest, but that does not mean that Mozilla has to control what the community does in marketing.
So, I have two questions to anyone interested in community marketing in Europe and beyond:

• What do you need that you don’t have today?
• What do you have today that is especially effective?

Any thoughts are welcome, as comments here or on email to patrick (at) mozilla.com.

There has been a flurry of criticism for the internet for, er, internet critic Andrew Keen’s essay “Economy to Give Open-Source a Good Thumping“.  Mr Keen predicts (with no little relish) that an economic downturn will see people reassessing the value of their labour, which will in turn lead to an end to what we might term the shared information economy.  He goes to suggest that this economy of sharing will be recorded as

a “mania,” these mid-21st-century historians will explain, like the Dutch Tulip mania of the 1630s

In fact, contemporary thinking is that the “Dutch Tulip Mania”, if such an event transpired at all, was wildly exaggerated: the principle record is a single source, published in Scotland over 200 years after the alleged mania.  But we digress.  Mr Keen’s point appears to be that open source consists of people irrationally “giving away” the fruits of their labour.

There are three points that Mr Keen lacks in his understanding of open source:

1. Utility (the dismal science’s placeholder for that which is desired) can take forms other than money (otherwise we would all work 24 hours a day);
2. Not all open source code is written “for free”;
3. In the software market the cost of unit production is close to zero, and network externalities are extremely powerful in determining the value of software goods and services.

Against this backdrop, we might consider that an economic downturn will be a good thing for open source software.  While Mr Keen evidently sees the rise of open source as a sign of decadence, in fact the emergence of the commercial open source sector coincided with the so-called dotcom bust.  Open source software tends to represent a rationalised method of production, which can reduce the frictional cost of the proprietary software model, which contains a large rump of undifferentiated and duplicative software.

What is more, software is (or can be) an industrial good.  Low-cost software means that economic activity can be stimulated with substantially less investment than in the proprietary model: just what the credit-crunch ordered.

All well and good.  But some of the refutations of Mr Keen are equally wide of the mark.  In particular, CNet’s Matt Asay (a chap never short of an opinion), who responded that open source is

a free market, capitalist phenomenon that depends upon M-O-N-E-Y.

I know others share this view, indeed, I’ve had this very discussion with no less an authority than Ian Murdock.  There is some merit in Mr Asay’s position: open source clearly is a method of market disruption in a competitive (or indeed, uncompetitive) software market.  It has the potential to decrease the value of the market and then to capture a large share of that market quickly; it can also greatly reduce the barriers to entry for suppliers and to exit for consumers.

Open source is hardly inherently anti-capitalist then.  If anything, open source frequently reflects the sharp end of the market, where competition is intensified and profit margins shrink.

So what is the problem with Mr Asay’s piece?  It is two-fold.  For one, Software development and political economy are orthogonal concepts.  For example, if we consider how software development might look in a command economy, some form of a shared codebase under a copyright license from the code owner would seem likely.  Indeed, many of the world’s most leftist governments have policies specifically designed to foster open source developement and consumption.

But lastly, we return to the point that utility is not in all cases pecuniary.  Not all free software is a loss-leader.  Many people derive great satisfaction from others using their software, from others reading their translated documents, from others benefiting from their help, indeed, from changing the world.  It is hard to put a price on such an experience.

Three delightful days in Paris spent with colleagues and attending the inaugural Mozilla Add-on Workskop flew by (unlike, ironically, the journey there and back).   I spent a very entertaining time meeting William, Brian, Staś (known as Stats to some) and traveling there and back with the other half of Mozilla Eskilstuna, David.  David took the opportunity of being in Paris to avail himself of the latest and greatest in digital photography equipment.  But if, like me, you’re the kind of chap who always leaves his camera in his hotel room, you’ll find these images of Paris taken with a phone camera more to your taste.

William, demonstrating my favourite feature of the iPhone: its ability (thanks to a predictably poor battery life) to transform itself into the world’s most cumbersome mobile phone.

Detail from a beautiful Parisian art nouveau building, just behind and not to be confused with the Pompidou Centre, a less-than-beautiful Parisian modern art building.  More on this fabulous edifice here.

I agree with the sentiment but couldn’t fathom the irony at 7am.

The moon over the Paris Mairie.  There must be over 100 people immortalised in statues on its walls.  To my regret, I recognised about four of the names, and one of those was the wrong Camus.

A blast from my past: a crescent of virginal OpenSolaris CDs at the MAOW.

Use Firefox?  Care about it, but aren’t the kind of person who files bug reports, or writes code?

Well, Firefox in your country, the survey which they’re already calling “not very onerous or intrusive“, is an opportunity to share what you think of Firefox and what could be done to make it better.   If you speak English, Spanish, Polish, German, Brazilian Portuguese or Indonesian, please take the time to answer a few questions if you care about Firefox, and pass it on to anyone else you know who does.  In fact, please do it even if you do file bug reports or write code…

Inspirational stuff from Cory Doctorow about the importance of Firefox in the face of Google Chrome. I think that those who think Chrome is intended to kill Firefox, or that think that Google will somehow do so inadvertently, underestimate the power of community, and of user advocacy.

That the user is paramount may mean to some the ability to block adverts, to others, increasing their security, and to others, simply changing the appearance of their browser. But when this freedom aggregated across a large proportion of users, it means that the Web remains in some sense literally democratic, that is, governed by the choices of people and not of monopolies or oligarchies. This is, after all, only the beginning.

I wondered about this chap for a while:

Turns out his name is Foxkeh and he’s the official mascot of (you guessed it) Mozilla Japan. So popular has he become, that you can even, in the parlance of our times, pimp your browser to share in the Foxkeh love. Yes, a Foxkeh theme for Firefox has just been released.

Admit it, you’re similing.

Amazing news on Monday as Manchester City Football Club was suddenly acquired by the Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG). Who immediately gazumped the previously financially peerless Chelsea to the signing of good-but-not-that-good Brazilian forward Robinho for a British record transfer fee, making the inconsistent Robinho the highest paid player in the history of the game.

The transfer window is now closed, but when it reopens, we are hearing from ADUG that money will be no object as they intend to assemble the best team in the world. The English game has been struggling for a while to accommodate Chelsea, whose financial clout is underwritten by one of the world’s richest men, Roman Abramovich. Chelsea’s sudden weight in the transfer market immediately inflated transfer fees, and queered the pitch for all. To what extent? Well, Chelsea’s losses frequently exceed the turnover of even their closest rivals.

Now Abramovich is understood “to be worth” (curious phrase, that) around $23.5 billion, or about €16 billion. The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, owners of ADUG, have an estimated wealth of upwards of €800 billion and have signaled their intention to sign just about every top player in Europe, and Critistiano Ronaldo, in the January transfer window.

How do we view investors like Abramovich, and the ADUG? Are they bringing excitement to all, making for a more exciting sport, or are they spoiling it, their unnatural concentrations of wealth making for an uncompetitive and distorted market? Is the game about the people, or about the rich? About the stars, or the grassroots? Clearly the game has changed: a giant with obscure motives and vast wealth has entered the market.

In other news on Monday, Google announced its Chrome browser.

(Inter)national treasure Stephen Fry talks about the 25th anniversary of the GNU project. Mr Fry is a wonderfully humanising influence (as the number of people who seem to want to appeal to him for personal counselling on his website would testify).

I am hugely sympathy for the Free software movement. Those within (and without) open source who dismiss it as “extremist” would do well to remember just how many visionary and important thinkers have come from outside of the mainstream. No; their apparent radicalism has done us all a great service.

But if I have a difficulty with the Free software movement at all, (and I’m not entirely sure I do), it is that it has occasionally demonstrated a lack of empathy for others. Our freedom is subservient to our underlying humanity, and not the other way around. And so, who better to introduce Free software than the very gentlest of gentlemen?