PKB

I’ve got Dexy’s Midnight Runners pumping over the stereo right now.

Yes, I know.

Lame. Kitsch. Overalls.

I remember a conversation I had with a childhood friend in the ’80’s, when I was in my teens. We were driving back from the movies in Pasadena. The song I’m listening to, “Come On Eileen,” was playing on the car radio. I recall saying, “One day, we’ll be the adults, and this song will be on a classic rock station.”

That day has come for me.

Bob and Owen, wherever you are, I hope you’re well. The music I loved growing up in the ’80’s still holds up for me. Today, I created an ’80’s playlist: Jesus and Mary Chain, REM, Echo and the Bunnymen, New Order, English Beat, The Clash, Tears for Fears, the Smiths, X, and so on.

I grew up in L.A., and back in the day, KROQ was the source for new music. Rodney on the Roq, even Richard Blade, were connected to the new music bubbling up in a way that seems lost in today’s morass of radio consolidation.

At the same time, the democratizing force of the Web is bringing life to new voices across the spectrum. Music blogs today function for me the way Rodney did in my teens. An unfiltered guide to new music to check out. See my music bookmarks for the music blogs I follow.

Happy New Year to everyone out in the world. The past two months for me at Mozilla have been every bit the joy and challenge I’d hoped for when I signed up.

2006 will be a great year for us. Said as a wish, and a promise.

Image source: http://www.zone-sf.com/matrixrel.html

There is that rush I can recall, settling into the cinema seat, exhaling as the lights dim, and the shutter behind me starts syncopating at 24 frames a second, and then suddenly I am living someone else’s life as the movie envelopes me.

I love film.

I know I’m not alone.

I hope we’ll see entries to the Firefox Flicks Ad Contest we launched today that are magic.

If you’re reading this, you probably already care about Firefox. Help us get the word out about this next leg in the race to tell the rest of the world what you already know.

Tell your film, advertising, and animation friends about the contest. This is an incredible opportunity for someone to make their mark. Amazingly accomplished judges, great prizes, and the chance to be included in the worldwide marketing campaign for Firefox.

We’ll be waiting in the front row at the premiere.

So I’ve been trained since day one of using a Web browser to bookmark stuff I find that I like.

Lately I’ve been realizing how low the utility is of having a single set of bookmarks tied to a local machine. Some of the people I work with don’t even bother with bookmarking anymore. They rely instead on a combination of auto-complete of previously browsed URLs and Google to get back to stuff that was interesting.

There’s a big discussion going on right now at the Mozilla project on how to make bookmarks better in Firefox 2.

Today I finally got around, post Firefox 1.5 launch, to doing something I’ve been meaning to do for at least the past month or so: migrating my local bookmarks to del.icio.us. It took about an hour, but man, do I feel better. Like I lost about 10 pounds.

As I looked back at the stuff I’ve bookmarked over the past two months, it was chunked into the following content areas that were top of mind for me at the end of 2005:

• Firefox-specific
• Web industry
• General business/management
• Marketing and branding
• Design
• Writing
• Music

I’m sure there’s a way to add more structure to my new del.icio.us bookmarks so the stuff I tag can get browsed more easily.

Given the fact that it took me a year to figure out what the hell del.icio.us was good for, the release of a del.icio.us extension for Firefox 1.5 to actually create an account, and a rainy Saturday to make the migration happen, it may be 2012 before I figure this out.

Whatevs. Now I can get at my links from anywhere, which makes me very happy.

This is one of the best pieces of writing I’ve seen yet about Mozilla and Firefox. From this week’s issue of The Economist. Enjoy.

A few weeks ago we announced several planned changes to Mozilla Web sites. And on 29 Nov 2005, we launched the new Mozilla.com. At the time we launched the new site, we were planning to continue to update and improve Mozilla.com for our visitors.

One of the first things we’d like to do is make it easier for non-English speaking visitors to Mozilla.com to quickly get localized information about Mozilla software, and download their preferred language versions.

The team responsible for managing these Web site updates here at Mozilla wants to work closely with the international Mozilla community, including Mozilla’s international affiliates, to make these improvements.

We’ve set up a Wiki to plan, implement and manage this localization project at: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla.com/Localization.

We invite the international community to help us flesh out end user requirements for changes to mozilla.com to help international visitors better navigate the site. You’ll find a stub of a project plan and initial schedule at the link above.

We see Mozilla.com as a work in progress, and as we continue to update and improve it, you can find a list of the ongoing work and projects at the Mozilla.com wiki page: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla.com.

Rocketboom is now available on Tivo.

I first heard of Rocketboom when their New Yorker-on-the-street segment on “Firefox or IE?” made the rounds here at Mozilla.

We got a huge kick out of the video, for obvious reasons.

So it was cool to find out they’re getting access to Tivo users. I’m S.O.L. as I cancelled cable service a couple of years ago, and using Tivo on my crappy over the air reception would be an even more masochistic act than weeding out comment spam on this blog.

But it got me to thinking.

When you push video as Rocketboom has till now exclusively over the Web, you’re reaching viewers in a less than relaxed state. I mean this both physically and mentally. When I’m on the Web, 99.9% of the time I’m sitting in a chair, either at home or at work. On top of the obvious comfort constraint on settling in to watch something online, my Web video attention span is also shortened because I’m either in the midst of work, or I recall some other meatspace thing I need to do, and so cut off the video I was watching to get on with the task.

The use case for watching video on my TV is almost exactly the opposite. I settle into the couch, and commit to watching a movie or sports broadcast for significantly longer than I would on my computer. I’m definitely multi-tasking some of the time, but when I’m engaged by the video I’m watching, it takes precedence over reading the paper, making a phone call, etc.

None of this analysis is new. I bring it up because the form factor for Rocketboom’s content has been 3-5 minute clips, designed for the attention dynamics of Web viewers. I’m curious to see if they adapt their content for an audience that has the luxury of engaging more deeply with their videos, because they’re cold chilling on fine barcaloungers.

Ah yes. Popcorn on the settee, alpha waves releasing the endorphin buzz only fine TV can deliver. Daydream nation dead ahead.