PKB

Thanks to the marketing team at Google for the support. This is the first time a third party product has ever been featured on Google’s homepage. For now, only IE users in the US will see the promo.

A group of us from Mozilla are at the Maker Faire this Saturday, April 22. Come by Maker Hall B (near the crazy Lego User Group exhibit) and say hi if you’re at the show!

Just got back from a two day work trip to NYC. At a club in the Lower East Side, whose name I couldn’t tell you for the life of me, the current single from Arctic Monkeys came on. I’d heard this song a bunch of times on the radio driving to work and was not digging it.

Hearing it in a loud, crowded Manhattan club completely changed the experience. The song was meant to be listened to in that kind of environment. The kind of place where you have to shout to be heard by the person sitting two feet next to you.

I remember an interview I read with Beck. He was recording Odelay, and each day he’d take material he’d worked on and go for a drive to listen to it. He said that he wanted to recreate, in advance, the environment he expected the record would actually get listened to within. The ambient L.A. freeway noise adding unexpected texture to the music.

Does the environment you experience something within color the experience? Probably so. Now that a chunk of my life involves the computer and the Web, where are the natural variables that the real world offers in spades? To fuse experience into memory, maybe even emotion.

The Web experience we’ve all been at the emergence of is going to evolve many times over in the next ten years. Finding a way to bring the real world to the bloodless way most of us experience the Web would be amazing.

Not as a substitute for getting out and being in the crowd. But as a way to bring that energy to what is mostly just a cerebral activity today.

After a whole lot of work by several hundred very talented Firefox enthusiasts, the joint team here at Mozilla (Asa, Cheryl, Jeremy, Aravind and Justin) and at Revver (thanks Nick and Oliver), we’re happy to announce the launch of the updated FirefoxFlicks.com community video site.

Asa’s blogged about the rollout, and is showing off the cool functionality of embedding videos on your own blog or site. We’re starting with 3 great videos about Firefox. Many more videos will be rolled out over the next few weeks, and we’ll be announcing the winner of the Flicks contest in late April.

One of the most insightful books I’ve read the past few years is Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (His last name is pronounced “chicks-send-me-high”, or so I’ve read.)

Back in 2004, at my last job, we hired an amazing design firm to help us develop the messaging for the product I marketed before Firefox. Their co-founder gifted my marketing team with copies of Flow because she and her team felt the ideas expressed there were core to why people loved our product. They hoped the central notions of flow that Csikszentmihalyi articulated would be translated into the messaging we created. (Jury’s out on whether we succeeded on that front. Eh, probably not so much.)

Csikszentmihalyi tells you what it takes to be happy as a human. I can’t be any more clear about what I took away from the book than that.

Rather than try to distill his work into deep-fried bluggets (term of art; contraction of “blog nuggets”), let me point you to what some other people have had to say.

• Diego Rodriguez
  
• Caterina Fake
• Wikipedia
• Wired

No particular reason for sharing this. I seem to be latching on to other people’s reactions to the concept of flow lately. Lots of alignment for me in the concept with my own spiritual practice.

I’ll leave you with a bit of transcript goodness from one of Csikszentmihalyi’s lectures in Australia.

Flow is at root: “How to live life as a work of art, rather than as a chaotic response to external events…”

Over the weekend a friend sent over a link to a user-created ad for the Chevy Tahoe. Chevy’s agency, as part of a marketing campaign with The Apprentice, did a pretty stellar job of providing clips, soundtracks and a slick tool for writing your own copy for your ad. Nonetheless, the only ads I’ve seen making the viral rounds are the ones that subvert the official message.

The virals that made it around the blogosphere talk about global warming (or as Seth Godin has put it, so inimitably, atmosphere cancer) and surface what is usually the subject of private conversations among people inclined to critique advertising.

Namely, that the Chevy ad imagery — most SUV ad imagery — is built on a lie.

The lie is that the average SUV driver will ever take their steed offroad where it can pulse, roar, and become the ur-chariot of a wilderness loving ur-outdoorsman. The lie is that the SUV is in loving alignment with the pristine environment usually featured in the advertising.

The point of this ramble.

If the positive applications of your product are seriously outweighed by the negative costs it imposes, it’s a good idea to skip venues on the Web where people can comment on this disjunction and speak truth to your marketing. Nike ran into a similar problem when they offered up custom slogans on their sneakers.

The bigger picture for me is that we live in an era where corporations are beginning to be held to the same standards of truth telling that govern our interactions with our neighbors, co-workers and friends.

Because the soapbox an individual stands upon has global reach.

Barring serious manipulation by governments or telcos, truth in advertising, at least on the Web, may actually become something more than an unenforced federal requirement.