Mark Surman’s thoughts on OneWebDay 2009 and why the Web matters. Check out his original post here.
I woke up this morning to a feed reader full of I <3 the web photos from India. Got to the office: a bunch more from Europe. And a video from Toronto. Today is OneWebDay. And, slowly, a wave of celebration for the web is rolling around the world.
Why take the time to say ‘I love the web’? My reason: I believe it is worth stopping to remember that the web is not only a huge source of creativity, innovation and wonder, but it’s also something all of us help create everyday. The web may feel like oxygen, just there all the time. But it is oxygen that we all help to make. OneWebDay is about taking a moment once a year celebrate the (better and open) web we’re all creating.
Editor’s note: The inaugural Open Video Conference took place last week in New York City (Mozilla was one of the sponsors). Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, has posted some observations about the conference, which are excerpted here. We’re excited about the future of video on the web as we prepare to release Firefox 3.5, with built-in support for the open video format.
Wow! was the only word that can really sum up the Open Video Conference last weekend in New York City. It was an amazing confluence of people from the worlds of online video, art, free culture, open content and web technology. This is not a group that comes together often, but it turns out sparks fly when they do (in a good way).
Next steps: start doing the small and easy things (open video awareness and documentation), and figure out a way to pick up some of the hard stuff along the way (better codecs, easy tools, deeper connections to the people who make video). The good news is there are alot of people and orgs that want to make it happen, and they are gathering around this idea of an Open Video Alliance (the umbrella for the conference). Good things ahead.
Exciting news! Today, Dailymotion, one of the world’s largest video entertainment websites, announced support for the new open video and web standards available in the current beta release of Firefox 3.5. Dailymotion issued a press release about the news. Mozilla’s own Director of Evangelism, Chris Blizzard, has a great post about the news as well, excerpted below.
Dailymotion has been an excellent test case for us because they haven’t just encoded with the formats that we support but also built a full-fledged player using HTML, CSS and JavaScript that looks, feels and acts like the flash-based players we see on the web today. They also make it possible to embed open video using an clever
Standing on the twin pillars of the HTML5 video API and royalty-free codecs, the movement to bring open video to the web is well underway. Dailymotion, along with Wikipedia and the Internet Archive, have all committed to start serving up open video. The free encoders are getting better and better over time and we’re starting to see more interest in the technologies.
The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI) announced that Mitchell Baker is a winner of this year’s Women of Vision Awards in the Leadership category. Mitchell, along with Yuqing Gao, IBM Research, and Jan Cuny, National Science Foundation, was honored for her accomplishments and contributions as a woman in technology at ABI’s fourth annual Women of Vision Awards Banquet at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose on April 30th, 2009.
The news was announced in a press release issued by The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, excerpted below, which also links to a video detailing Mitchell’s accomplishments:
Mitchell Baker is recognized for her work as the leader of the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to openness and innovation on the Internet. Her work with the Mozilla Foundation and the Firefox Web Browser has evolved the technology around web browsing with more than 200 million users worldwide. Her leadership in the Open Source movement has impacted millions of people, through her way of integrating and unifying the work of company employees and an international community of volunteers.
The Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal also highlighted the recipients in an article on Monday. Please join us in congratulating Mitchell on this achievement!
In response to questions that have been asked about Mozilla’s involvement with the recent European Commission (EC) conclusion regarding Microsoft’s tying of Internet Explorer to the Windows operating system, we’ve prepared this brief set of questions and answers.
What is Mozilla’s involvement in the EC’s complaint against Microsoft?
We are following it closely and are obviously interested in the outcome. Mozilla has received “interested third party” status in the EC’s investigation. As a result, we may see the Statement of Objections confidentially. We may participate in a hearing if the EC concurs. Mozilla’s role as an interested third party best enables us to contribute our knowledge of the browser industry to the EC. Mozilla is not a complainant; we have not “joined the suit”, despite some reports to the contrary.
Why is Mozilla getting involved?
The EC has taken a position that Microsoft’s actions harm competition among web browsers. The EC is currently developing a response based on this conclusion. A good remedy could be helpful; a bad remedy could create more damage. Mozilla has relevant and unique expertise in the web browser industry, both as to the nature of the damage and the complexities of possible remedies. We believe it’s worth offering that expertise to the EC. Ultimately, this case has huge potential impact on our mission of supporting an open and participatory web.
What does Mozilla want to have happen?
We want any remedy imposed to support an open and participatory web. By the same token, we seek to avoid any remedy that causes unintended damage.
There have been a number of opinions shared by individuals affiliated with Mozilla. What is Mozilla’s official stance on the EC complaint?
As with any dedicated and enthusiastic community, ours is one of diverse opinions. Our official stance: (1) we want to offer our knowledge to the EC as it considers its next steps; and (2) we intend to continue public discussions of this topic.
What remedies does Mozilla propose?
Mozilla has not proposed any remedies at this point. We have started a discussion to help figure out what the options are and how helpful they might be.
When will you have an opinion on remedies?
We’re synthesizing feedback from our community, our own previous experiences and from the EC. We don’t have a preset timetable.
What will the EC’s decision mean for Microsoft in other parts of the world?
Mozilla has no way of knowing this – we’ll learn what this means along with everyone else.
For additional information, please refer to the following blog posts by Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Foundation chair:
Editor’s note: Mozilla announced the Mozilla Labs Concept Series on Monday, August 4, 2008. See Chris Beard’s comprehensive post on the Mozilla Labs blog, excerpted here:
The concept series is a new initiative by Mozilla Labs to make it easy to contribute to the development of the online experience. You don’t have to be a software engineer to get involved, and you don’t have to know how to program computers. Everyone is welcome to participate. We’re particularly interested in engaging with designers who have not typically been involved with open source projects. And we’re biasing towards broad participation, not finished implementations.
We’re hoping to lower the barrier to participation by providing a forum for surfacing, sharing, and collaborating on new ideas and concepts. Our goal is to bring even more people to the table and provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole.
The AMO team has been hard at work for the last many months on a major site redesign and is pleased to announce the availability of the new AMO site. This is a significant release and chock-full of goodies for end users and add-on authors alike. The focus has been predominantly to provide a visual refresh, simplify navigation and rework the add-on developer tools area. But that doesn’t quite capture just how much effort has gone into this release. So, here is a full rundown of all the changes.
And some praise for our editors and localizers from Mike Morgan:
Our editors have worked hard to review new and updated add-ons as we move towards Firefox 3 this year and our localizers translated roughly 200 new strings in AMO templates in a little over three weeks for 24 locales (wow).
Lastly, some user experience notes from Madhava Enros:
This release is particularly exciting for me, partly because the wireframes and interaction-model for the site were the first things I worked on when I arrived at Mozilla. Also, though, because alongside the re-skinning and reorganization of the site, I think we’ve managed to improve the user-experience of finding and installing add-ons in a number of interesting ways.
If you live in (or are visiting) the Bay Area, you can help by donating old hardware and by helping install Ubuntu.
If you are part of a company with a local office or a local user group (are you listening Linux, MySQL, Perl, PHP, PostgreSQL, Python, Ruby, etc. user groups), try to round up your geeky crew to get them down to the event.
My name is Sarah, and I am a marketing intern at Mozilla and also a returning senior at Stanford University. One of the projects I worked on at Mozilla this summer was the Firefox Campus Edition, which is a special edition of Firefox designed specifically for students like me. The Campus Edition bundles the latest version of Firefox with three great add-ons: FoxyTunes, Zotero, and StumbleUpon. What student has time to look through all the awesome add-ons that Firefox offers? No worries; Mozilla has made it easy for us. Here’s a little bit of info about each add-on:
FoxyTunes lets you control almost any media player and find lyrics, covers, videos, bios and much more right from your favorite browser.
StumbleUpon lets you channel surf the Internet to find great websites, videos, photos and more based on your interests.
Zotero helps you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work – in Firefox itself.
These tools will allow you to maximize your time doing research and have fun while surfing the Web. Just download and enjoy:http://www.firefox.com/backtoschool.
