PKB

good times.

Just a reminder that our first official Firefox t-shirt design contest is quickly coming to a close.

We kicked off this contest about a month ago as one of our first Firefox 3 launch activities and we’ve had over 1,400 entries submitted and more than 3,000 people join the contest pool on Flickr.

Tara Shahian, who’s been managing the contest here at Mozilla, has posted a note to The Mozilla Blog with all the details on how to get your entry in before the deadline of this Sunday, March 16 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time (which equals Monday, March 17 at 6:59 a.m. GMT).

The Firefox 3 T-Shirt Design Contest is drawing to a close! You can still submit your entry, but time is running out - the deadline is this Sunday, March 16.

We’ve already received close to 1,200 submissions and have created a community of over 2,800 members on the Flickr contest group! There are many great designs in the image pool and we’re proud of the creative talent that has come through so far. The winning design, as chosen by the Mozilla community, will be featured in the Mozilla Store as the official Firefox 3 t-shirt.

Along with everyone else here on the marketing team at Mozilla, I’m excited about the creativity and inspiration everyone who’s entered the contest has shown in their designs. It’s going to make selecting a winner a very difficult but fun job.

*Percy Cabello at Mozilla Links shares his faves from the contest here.

We <3 you too.

I subscribe to a feed from the public timeline on Twitter on the keywords “Firefox 3″ to get direct reactions to our betas from the users of Twitter around the world. Completely unscientifically, since Firefox 3 Beta 3 came out the buzz that I’ve seen from Twittering Firefox 3 beta users has become amazingly positive.

Here’s a quick triptych I pulled together this morning from public updates. Keep in mind Twitter users are most likely people who are quite up on new technology and savvy about using it. To me this says: they have high standards for software and will let you know pretty vocally if you ain’t hitting the mark.

We’re doing great on this front folks.

Check the river of updates yourself at the brilliant Tweetscan service. The RSS feed for “Firefox 3″ updates is what I subscribe to.

This post is intended for reference for anyone interested in understanding how we conduct viral marketing at Mozilla.

We just rolled out the Firefox + Freerice.com marketing program in conjunction with the announcement of Firefox achieving 500 million downloads on Thursday, Feb. 21, 2008.

From the Mozilla Blog:

Firefox just reached 500,000,000 downloads. This is an absolutely phenomenal milestone for Firefox. It is sort of hard to imagine what that number means. For some perspective, that’s roughly the audience size of 10,000 Rome Colosseums combined. It would be the weight, in kilograms, of 8,500 Boeing 747 airplanes. In dollars, for $500 million you and 15 of your friends can fly to the International Space Station.

OR, you can affect change and invite 15 of your friends to play a game and feed 25,000 people. With your help we can break another milestone today with FreeRice.com - 500,000,000 grains of donated rice in one day. Imagine helping to feed the hungry while picking up some new vocabulary too!

We’ve tracked the spread of the idea here:

• Front page of Digg
• Front page of Techcrunch
• Ars Technica
• Mozilla Links
• FreeRice.com put up a note saying:
  

  “In honor of the 500 millionth download of its browser, Mozilla Firefox is encouraging people from around the world to donate 500 million grains of rice at FreeRice. Click here for details.”

My personal favorite reaction to our announcement is this video, not made by anyone at Mozilla, that uses remixed photos of past grassroots marketing our extended Mozilla community has participated in to let people know about the 500 million grains of rice program.

It’s amazing, awe-inspiring and humbling all at the same time to be a part of this worldwide community! Thanks everyone for rallying and making this happen in less than 5 days with zero dollars spent; and most importantly, for meaningfully helping others who need a hand.*

Here’s more about FreeRice.com:

*And thanks to Polvi for once again leading the charge.

I’ve been meaning for a while now to point to the awesome, inspired work students at Seneca College have been doing as part of the Digital Media Arts Program there. Brendan Sera-Shriar is the professor at Seneca who’s pulled together the curriculum and projects — check out the results from a recent class project to create microsites for Firefox 3. Great work folks!