Seth Godin speaks to Google employees about marketing; a video worth watching for all GNOME “marketers” out there.
[I]t's thinking about… not that you deserve the conversation with regards to how good [your product] is but how can you cause conversations to take place.
Tristant Nitot pointed to some of the most recent numbers for Mozilla Firefox's market share: 14.4% in Oceania, 14.1% in Europe, 11.8% in North America (12.3% in the US), 5.8% in Asia, 5.2% in South America and 4.3% in Africa. The good news is that these numbers have been steadily growing for a while and continue to do so to reach significant levels now in certain parts of the world (31% in Finland! Go Finland!). The work done by the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla volunteers is definitely paying off.
This latest study also shows that Firefox is being installed at a higher rate in homes than in offices. In Europe for instance, there's a 2.5 point difference between Firefox usage on week days and on week-ends. Given the way most companies administer their software resources this is not particularly surprising. It does somewhat undermine the idea that software travels from offices to the homes with people installing on their home computer whatever piece of software they're using at work.
The low percentage points in developing regions like Asia, South America and Africa are surprising to me. Free software is usually said to do better in developing countries — since it can be distributed, customized and translated into minority languages freely — but this is not what I'm seeing here. Though I don't really know how to explain this phenomenon, widespread software piracy could be a factor.
In countries where law enforcement resources are limited and where therefore commercial software can be acquired cheap or at no cost, the freedom to redistribute copies guaranteed by free software licenses, arguably the most interesting of all “software freedoms” for non-technical users, is illegally granted to all making the benefits of true free software moot. Moreover, in these conditions, the need for consumers to critically evaluate the price of software vs. its actual worth disappears because the financial cost of using or trying unsatisfactory software is virtually null. And since software prices in developing nations are comparatively higher than they are elsewhere, the gap between price and expectations which could be more significant there than in “developed” nations actually ends up being narrower. This in turns makes for fewer opportunities for free software to spread as an alternative to commercial, and potentially expensive and unsatisfactory, software.
So what's the bad news? Well, nothing really, except that I am impatient by nature and that I can't help but thinking that things are moving too slowly. Firefox is technically better than its alternative, it is one of the best advertised Free/Open Source projects, and yet it is reaching “only” 14.4% of its intended audience at its best (on average, per continent). While this steady progression is good news for Firefox, the relatively low percentage worries me when I think about GNOME, the fantastic Linux desktop. How long before Linux and GNOME have 14% of the computer desktop market share?
I recently found out about John LoVerso's Proxy Auto Configuration ad-busting trick and tested it. It's quite efficient and integrates very easily with the GNOME desktop. By using John's file and GNOME's Network Proxy Preferences dialog you could be browsing the web free of annoying ad banners.
In the System menu, choose Preferences, then Network Proxy. Select the Proxy Configuration tab, pick Automatic proxy configuration and enter the path to the "no-ads.pac" file you'll have downloaded from the page referenced above.
If you're using Epiphany, that's it; you're done. If you're using Firefox, you'll need to change your connection settings to Auto-detect proxy settings for this network.
On a different and very anectodic note, if you happen to watch "Me and You and Everyone We Know" — and you should — the kids are using Gaim to chat.
Viralata.net’s previous white and gray design is no more. I got rid of it because I was getting tired of it, because it looked too web-like, and because I wanted to experiment with web typography. It’s still pretty minimalist but it’s also more textured: there’s a tiled background and a basic serif font working together to create richer and fuller looking pages than with the previous black sans-serif on plain white background. That’s partly what I mean when I say that I wanted something that wasn’t so web-like. I wanted to capture the feel of a printed paper page.
The default font size is much larger (12 points) than usual and the traditional blue and purple links have been replaced by a dark red (#a60000) and a dark gray (#333333). Playing with link colors is not something I would normally do. But since this is my personal site I can relax a bit and ignore the more conservative guidelines for good web design. I have nothing to sell on viralata.net and the site is small enough that I don’t expect anyone to feel lost and curse me for not playing by the rules.
The more unusual decision for me was to work with fixed point sizes, especially for fonts. While this goes against my normal preference for relative units, I figured that, once again, this being a personal site, I could bend the rules. Firefox and Opera are both able to display this new design at greater or smaller font sizes; I imagine that Safari can too. Unsurprisingly, Internet Explorer cannot but I can’t say that I care.
Using fixed point sizes helped me gain some control over the structure of the page. I have tried to play that element up by paying special attention to the space between lines, paragraphs and headers. I further tried to control the color of the page by redefining the strong and b tags not as indicators for bold weight but as red “ink.” I hope that I was able that way to create a contrast without disrupting the unity of the textblock.
I finally did what I had been meaning to do for a while now: redesign the schedule page of Telecine’s 5 movie channels. Telecine, Brazil’s Cinemax if you will, does have a schedule posted on its website but it’s done in Flash, it’s slow and it’s poorly designed. What’s more, it’s not going away anytime soon since they just completed their grand redesign.
My answer to their non-site is quite simple. I wrote one Python script which parses their monthly schedule file into XML—that operation happens once a month—and one PHP script which displays what’s currently on and what’s showing for the next 12 hours.
Check it out; it’s called programação Telecine.
Looking at the front pages of democrats.org and gop.com it struck me that the Republicans were using much more of their space attacking Kerry than the Democrats were attacking Bush.
I tried to put this impression in numbers and came up with this: 9% of democrats.org’s front page is dedicated to negative content—attacking the Republican Party or Bush—whereas gop.com has nearly 20% of its content focusing on attacks on Kerry and the Democratic Party.
Here’s how I came up with those numbers. First, I calculated the total area, in pixels, of both pages opened to the same width, on the same browser, using the same font size. Then, I subtracted the area of all links, images, flash animations, etc. containing or linking to negative content. The percentage reflects the relation of all negative areas to the total area.
I defined negative content as anything designed solely to attack a candidate’s record or personality. Comparisons of a candidate’s plan to that of his opponent was not considered negative content. Links to pages mixing negative and positive content—content praising one’s achievements or character—were not considered negative. I used the same criteria for both pages.
My silly calculations notwithstanding, it’s hard to visit gop.com and not be surprised by how much of it is dedicated to John Kerry. At the time I took the screenshots above, there were 4 pictures of him on gop.com vs. one, albeit a big one, of George Bush on democrats.org. His name appeared 36 times on gop.com’s front page, vs. 5 times for Bush’s name on democrats.org.
The GOP’s front page is longer and has, on average, 2.5 times more words or characters than the Democratic Party’s front page. But even taking this fact into account, gop.com is still more Kerry-intensive than democrats.org is Bush-intensive.