Mozilla's New Marketing Push

The new Mozilla marketing push reminds me of the TurboGrafx-16 and Nintendo 64 days. "We've got the better browser. And that's what really matters," says a member of the Mozilla Foundation team challenging Internet Explorer's overwhelming dominance in the browser market. Well, the TurboGrafx 16 was technically superior to the Sega Genesis, as was the Nintendo 64 to the Sony Playstation. Guess which game systems won the market share race? The inferior ones. (Beta vs. VHS, anyone?) Guess which systems I bought? The superior ones. Guess how many of my friends I could share games with? Zero, because they had Sega and Sony.

Jeff Howden at evolt.org has a realistic view of what's likely to happen to Mozilla:

Mozilla won't win with the general public by having a superior feature set. It won't win by rendering faster or being more standards-compliant. Heck, IE didn't do any of those things to get where it is today. It's on top because it's on every desktop.

Too true. It's on mine too, but I use Mozilla. Unfortunately, me plus 1.2 percent of Web users does not a viable market make.

Walled-Off Archives

Walled-off archives are fodder for customer-driven free advertising, Jeff Jarvis writes. He and some A-list bloggers got a preview of America Online's blogging tool:

Anil and I got excited lecturing these AOL-Time-Warner megolith folks that what they should do is give their bloggers back doors into the otherwise fenced-off content of People et al -- as the New York Times is doing with bloggers, allowing them to link directly even to archived stories. That might sound like heresy, treating the expensive People gossip as a commodity. But the truth is -- repeat: the truth is -- that by creating such a back door, AOL would cleverly be turning its audience into its marketing force: AOL bloggers would be the privileged ones who can show you People content (thus selling AOL subs) and if their readers want to see more, they have to buy the magazine (thus selling magazine subs).

Right. I'd change "privileged ones" to "prestigious ones." Readers derive a sense of prestige from perceiving they're among the first with the scoop on the topics that interest them. People's business is gathering scoops on celebrities. If AOL bloggers were the only ones who could link directly to People's archive, their increased prestige could make AOL blogs a destination for celebrity news and increase People's readership at the same time.

Is Unlinked Content Really There?

"It isn't content until it's linked." Jeff Jarvis offers the blogging world's equivalent of "If a tree falls in the wilderness and no one's there to hear it, does it make a sound?" He's right. In the vast blogosphere, a voice isn't a voice until it's heard. And you get heard when voices to which people already are listening talk about you.

Blogs in Space!

International Space Station science officer Ed Lu (who doubtless laughed at having to repeatedly write his name on the board as a grade-school punishment) is blogging from space. Naturally, my favorite entry is Eating at Cafe ISS, wherein we learn there's no way to get cold water even with the frigid expanses of space just inches out the window.

Remembering DOS File System Isn't a Good Thing

DOS memories mangled my images.

So johnfulwider dot com's masthead images showed up fine in Internet Explorer running on Windows, but not on IE for the Mac or Mozilla for any platform. Talking with my undergrad photojournalism professor yielded advice - check that they're saved in RGB color - that didn't pan out because the images were indeed saved correctly. The mystery continued and my gentle readers (all two of them) couldn't see that mysterious man with the Morpheus-style sunglasses, just my ALT text.

Turns out that traveling through my labyrinthine cortex to the days of Microsoft's Disk Operating System, the last OS I fully understood, I used paths to my images in the form \photos\title_bar_pic.jpg. You know, with a backslash instead of a forward slash. Now Windows, built as it is on DOS's grave, understood my backslashes. But nobody else did. Flipping the slashes fixed it.

Thanks to my former colleagues Anne and Gregg for pointing out the boo-boo.

How Online Groups Go Bad

Clay Shirky's (as ever) excellent essay, "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy," explains how online groups go bad and what can be done to rescue them from the start. It's tough to do justice to the first half of his piece in a summary, but his recommendations can be briefed:

1. Handles (nicknames, usernames, etc.) have to have meaning in the sense that they're reliably and visibly connected with a real person whose reputation can be monitored. Without keeping a handle on handles, trust within the group fails.

2. Reputation has to be attached so "good works get recognized."

There's an interesting pattern I'm seeing among the music-sharing group that operates between Tokyo and Hong Kong. They operate on a mailing list, which they set up for themselves. But when they're trading music, what they're doing is, they're FedExing one another 180-gig hard-drives. So you're getting .wav files and not MP3s, and you're getting them in bulk.
Now, you can imagine that such a system might be a target for organizations that would frown on this activity. So when you join that group, your user name is appended with the user name of the person who is your sponsor. You can't get in without your name being linked to someone else. You can see immediately the reputational effects going on there, just from linking two handles.
So in that system, you become a member in good standing when your sponsor link goes away and you're there on your own report. If, on the other hand, you defect, not only are you booted, but your sponsor is booted. There are lots and lots of lightweight ways to accept and work with the idea of member in good standing.

Like Slashdot's karma system, for instance.

3. Users must be segmented in terms of authority deriving from their participation in the system.

It has to be hard to do at least some things on the system for some users, or the core group will not have the tools that they need to defend themselves.

Now, this pulls against the cardinal virtue of ease of use. But ease of use is wrong. Ease of use is the wrong way to look at the situation, because you've got the Necker cube flipped in the wrong direction. The user of social software is the group, not the individual.

4. Plan for scale in advance. "The value is inverse to the size of the group. And you have to find some way to protect the group within the context of those effects." Take the Live Journal approach of "soft forking," where average-size groups have 12 members and the median group membership is five, but each small group is connected with others through individual users' personal networks. Or take the IRC channel and mailing list approach, where "as the signal to noise ratio gets worse, people start to drop off, until it gets better, so people join, and so it gets worse." Or just make it hard to sign up, like MetaFilter: "When we start seeing effects of scale, we shut off the new user page. 'Someone mentions us in the press and how great we are? Bye!' "

That's a way of raising the bar, that's creating a threshold of participation. And anyone who bookmarks that page and says "You know, I really want to be in there; maybe I'll go back later," that's the kind of user MeFi wants to have.

Blowing Things Up for Money

He gets paid for this. Chuck Cramer's job is to blow things up for Underwriters Laboratories. You'd think a job like this would be dangerous, but the worst he's ever done is "sparked a fire by running an electrical current through what turned out to be a faulty power strip." What about making toast in the bathtub, to see if toasters really merit a label warning against such goofery?

Design Theory for Foodies

Rarely do I find articles appealing to both my foodie and communications research interests. Jakob Nielsen's Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster does it for me with his theories that Internet users "behave like wild beasts in the jungle" searching for food (information); that a certain kind of user, the "informavore," must be led to content by an "information scent"; and that with widespread broadband adoption encouraging "information snacking," sites should aim to "support short visits; be a snack."

Inspiration is lacking during my usual noon-hour lunch-induced food coma, so I'll put it to my gentle readers: How can johnfulwider dot com be made both good-smelling and tasty, so as to attract nibbles from the informavores?