PKB

Here’s the story of how I got hooked on photography.

My first taste of the alchemy is when I get the prints back from a roll I took on a Pentax K1000, c. 1990. The Pentax (which I still have) is a heavy, solid machine. I save up from a summer job to be able to afford it. It’s mechanical, operated entirely manually. I have to study to learn how to configure film speed and f-stop.

What I see in the first set of prints: depth of field, so clearly better than anything shot in years of disposables, Polaroids and point and shoots. I took a picture of a bicycle, foregrounded. The out-of-focus trees and grass behind it helping create a story.

Material objects transmuted into an artifact (artifice?) that reaches some part of me that responds to art.

Other photos - a very few - I take that summer and fall with the K1000, make me feel the same way.

I’m writing about this because I happened to read a review of a documentary about William Eggleston in the local paper today.

It reminded me of some of the photographers whose work I love. Each of them reflects in their art a personal vision, of the world as inamorata.

Tina Modotti

Robert Capa

Cartier-Bresson

William Eggleston

Olivo Barbieri

We updated mozilla.com today with news of the four editorial awards Firefox has received in the two months since the release of 1.5. We also issued a press release this morning highlighting the strong adoption achieved by Firefox 1.5 - over twenty million people worldwide have made the move. Both the editorial recognition and the strong uptake of the current version of Firefox speak to the tremendous work being done by Mozilla project contributors.

Asa passes on a BrandChannel.com reader survey that ranks Firefox the 8th most impactful global brand in 2005, behind Nokia and Yahoo!, ahead of eBay and Sony. (BrandChannel.com is a well-established site that focuses on branding topics.)

Read the full article, or view just the chart that shows Firefox and the other brands in the reader top 10.

So what does this all mean? And why does it matter?

Get a basic overview of branding over at Wikipedia. The “Concepts” section will get you a quick summary of the language marketers use when discussing “brand.” The thing to walk away with is that there’s a reason why companies invest billions of dollars a year worldwide to promote their brands, whether it’s TV ads, print campaigns or sponsorships.

The reason is that years of increasingly refined market research have validated the fact that brand preference translates into a meaningful competitive advantage in our current economic system.

The job of a brand marketer is to, through a variety of measures, lodge a company’s brand somewhere deep in your frontal lobe, so that at some time in the future, when you’re in the store, or shopping online, or thinking about buying a new car, company X’s brand pops into your head as the preferred choice.

But it’s not enough to make the company’s logo appear in your head. An effective brand will also deliver a payload of emotion. It will make you associate qualities with company X’s brand that you’d normally reserve for people.

Try this exercise.

Think about a category of products. Say, computers.

Now what’s the first company that popped into your head? Was it Apple?

What sorts of things did you feel when you thought about Apple?

More importantly, how did those feelings get inside you in the first place?

This is part of branding, and why it matters. For Apple, it matters about this much: $8 billion, in value added to the overall enterprise by their brand in 2005.

Firefox is on this list because it’s an insanely great Web browser. I take this as reinforcement that the non-traditional ways in which our users have spread the word about Firefox can be more compelling than mass salvos of highly polished, gleaming brandoids. We just need to figure out how to scale our grassroots efforts out to a much bigger group of people…

If you found your way here from my link on the Firefox Flicks Backstage blog, welcome! My name’s Paul and I’m the director of product marketing for Mozilla, as well as part of the team here that’s working on the ad contest for Firefox.

Here’s my blog post from the launch of the ad contest. Can you tell how psyched I am to see your work? :-)

I’ll be posting on the main Backstage blog next week when I’m back from work travels. We’re excited to share production stories from ad contest teams worldwide, and to showcase finished ads in the coming months. Ciao for now.

I’m in Tokyo for work this week. Travelling with Chris and John, and meeting up with the Mozilla Japan team.

I was here once before, when I was seven. The only thing I remember of that trip is getting on a bullet train with my dad. I’m excited to fill in the blanks.

When I travel, I like getting out in the early morning by myself to walk the streets, take photos and let the place wake up around me. So here are some shots I took on my first day’s walkabout in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo.

Many observations already - and if you’re reading this and have some tips on out of the way stuff to do or see, let me know.

Update: John’s posted some more photos of our first day in Tokyo.

For background on this proposal, see the original blog post.

After reviewing the suggestions posted to http://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla.com/Localization on improving international user access to Mozilla.com, the marketing and sysadmin team at Mozilla met today to assess these options, and make a recommendation on how to achieve the objective of this project.

The objective of these changes, in the short-term, is to address a use case where a non-English speaking visitor comes to Mozilla.com. We want to enable these types of visitors to more easily get to a localized Mozilla web site than is currently possible from the following three places:

1. The Mozilla.com homepage at www.mozilla.com

2. The Firefox main product page at www.mozilla.com/firefox

3. The Thunderbird main product page at www.mozilla.com/thunderbird

The solution we are proposing is to add a dropdown menu to the footer area of these 3 web pages, that allows a visitor to select their language, from a list that matches the currently available set of localized Mozilla Web sites.

When the visitor has selected a language, he or she will be sent to the localized Mozilla web site that supports this language choice.

If the visitor has made the language selection on the homepage for Mozilla.com, they will be sent to the homepage for the localized Mozilla web site in their language. Language selections made on the Firefox main page at Mozilla.com/firefox will send the visitor to the localized Firefox main page of their choice. The same logic would follow for the Thunderbird main page.

Here is a screenshot of how the change might look:
http://www.numenity.org/mozilla-home.html

PROS:
-Easiest solution to implement given resources available.

-Preserves user choice over which language version of Mozilla web site they are viewing (vs. redirecting automatically based on accept-language headers).

-Pull down menu rather than full listing of language codes (as done on Mozilla Europe sites) preserves visual presentation and branding of Mozilla.com pages.

-Achieves objective of providing easier access to localized Mozilla web sites and product downloads.

CONS:
-A short term solution.

-Requires user to figure out behavior of the pull-down menu, and it will be difficult to communicate what the menu is for in a way that is understandable by non-English speakers.

-Only applies to 3 main content pages on Mozilla.com. Users may be entering Mozilla.com through some other entry page.

OTHER NOTES
The ideal solution would be to create a language specific set of pages for each locale we currently support. So for example, for the homepage of Mozilla.com, we would have index-en.html, index-de.html, and so on. We would then let Apache decide which language version of the homepage is served to the visitor based on the visitor’s accept-language headers. When we reviewed this option, we quickly realized that given our current international web site structure, this would mean adding more work for the l10n volunteers, who would then have to help translate both the main pages for the international Mozilla Web sites, *and* this additional set of localized home and product pages for Mozilla.com.

We also considered automatically redirecting users who were trying to visit Mozilla.com or GetFirefox.com based on accept-language headers to a localized Mozilla Web site. However we ultimately decided not to go this route either. The main concern is that we did not want to presume we knew the user’s intent in trying to access Mozilla.com. Implementing an automatic redirect might end up frustrating some international users who had actually wanted to visit the US English Mozilla.com Web site.

NEXT STEPS
We welcome your feedback on this proposed solution. We’ll take comments until next Friday, January 13, either here or at the Wiki.