PKB

Beautiful music resource posted at the Hype Machine today:

• The best 50 songs
• The best 50 albums
• The best 50 bands

of 2007, as bubbled up by the music bloggers Hype Machine tracks. RAWK!

The updated Piclens add-on for Firefox is pretty sweet. Check it here - it gives you a swoopy, full screen 3D interface for viewing and handling images from some of the usual suspects (flickr, photobucket, google image search) and the not so usual (deviantart).

Via John Nack.

On Monday morning, a blogger wrote that Mozilla had secretly launched a viral marketing campaign, which included some objectionable statistics comparing Firefox users to Internet Explorer users.

The blogger linked to a test site for the Firefox “Fight Against Boredom” campaign that was still in active development. The test site was openly accessible without authorization while it was being worked on, which made it look as though we meant it to be live.

If you visited the site on Monday morning before we put up password protection, you saw a placeholder video clip from the Craig Ferguson show, along with an unedited list of about 3,600 stats from Nielsen Online that we hadn’t yet vetted or approved.

There have been several assertions made since then about the Firefox “Fight Against Boredom” campaign that aren’t true:

• We didn’t write, make up or rewrite any of the 3,600 statistics that were on the test site, of which there were 30-40 that were clearly offensive. The statistics came directly from a widely used market research panel called @Plan, a service of Nielsen Online. It’s a large demographic dataset that’s used by marketers and advertisers to make media buying decisions, based on a regular survey of millions of US residents, and it happens to include Firefox usage as one factor you can then pivot the data on.
• We didn’t approve, authorize or request the inclusion of statistics that referenced health conditions. These statistics should never have been included, even on a test site.
• We did not launch this campaign on Monday. I’ve seen it reported that we launched it and then pulled the campaign. This was *not* an official launch.

This week, we spent a lot of time here talking over options for handling the campaign. Yesterday, we decided not to push the Fight Against Boredom site live.

Mainly, this is because there hasn’t been a strong positive response from the Mozilla community to the video that is the centerpiece of the campaign. The video’s still up on YouTube, and we’ll keep it up there. But we don’t plan to spend any more time on this campaign as it’s clear that people aren’t inspired by the video. We’ve learned what we needed to and we will move on to try new things.

Some background
The “Fight Against Boredom” campaign was part of an overall push we started in the fall of 2007 to improve Firefox retention. As part of this, we scoped out an online marketing campaign that focused on reconnecting with existing Firefox users and encouraging them to share a video with their friends. The video would lead to a web site with a brief list of actual statistics about Firefox users.

We’ve done several marketing campaigns over the past couple of years and with each one, we’ve learned more about how useful the different kinds of things we can do to spread Firefox are. I believe it’s part of the charter of the work we do for Mozilla as marketers to try our hand, to learn, and to share that knowledge to help spread Firefox. We will keep on trying new things, because that in the end is how we’ll achieve meaningful results that help Mozilla.

Big thanks to the Mozilla community for your invaluable part in keeping us honest, open and connected. Our shared commitment to keeping the Web healthy and open for people is the ultimate reason why we’re all here in the first place and we won’t lose sight of this goal.

* For anyone who’s interested, here are links to screenshots of the site as it was intended to be, the song lyrics and the video itself:

Update: I’ve posted a follow-up that explains in more detail what happened.

Earlier today TechCrunch linked to a still-in-development site for a marketing program we are working on called “Firefox Users against Boredom.” The site was not meant to be publicly available and contained several stats, taken from a recent Nielsen study, that were offensive and in poor taste, as pointed out both by readers of TechCrunch and many people here at Mozilla. I want to sincerely apologize for this oversight. We hadn’t reviewed the stats before they were accidentally published and some of them are clearly in poor taste and humor. This does not reflect the views of Mozilla and we are working to fix this immediately.

As a naming strategy, I think I see what’s happening here. A Firefox and a Fire Eagle are counter intuitive in exactly the right proportions. These names resist comprehension but only just. They are counter intuitive, but not unintelligible. In the first moment of exposure, we don’t quite get them…and this prevents them from washing over us and out into that sea of forgettable branding and marketing. Comprehension is held up just long enough for the new name to lock into memory. As branding becomes more subtle, we will see more and more of this.

- via Grant McCracken, who writes a terrific blog on anthropology, economics and culture, and who’d probably be bemused by how the name actually originated