Monthly Archives: December 2011

IE6 is dead, Firefox lives, and Mozilla is (still) awesome

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Reports of Firefox’s death were greatly exaggerated.

For the last several weeks, we’ve seen a stream of speculative hype and forecasts of doom from many in the tech press. But today, all that’s been put to rest — like we always knew it would be:

And we’re just getting started

As Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs points out, Mozilla is growing, leading, and doubling down on its non-profit mission in crucial new ways: working to create a web literate planet, building a generation of web makers, breaking commercial choke-holds through our vision for apps, setting mobile free, putting people in charge of their online identity, and pushing the web forward.

A nice triple for the open web

As Ryan Merkley pointed out, this week marks an interesting triple play for the open web:

1) Internet Explorer 6, the browser that once threatened to break the internet, is now officially slated for extinction.

Even Microsoft now concedes on its IE6 countdown site that there’s just no place for a non-standards compliant browser:

“…in an era of modern web standards, it’s time to say goodbye.”

Firefox created that era. We’re all now living in the open, standards-based and competitive world Mozilla fought to create.

2) Firefox 9 — the most awesome Firefox yet — just shipped today.

3) And the Mozilla Google deal is done, providing an important revenue stream to continue and expand our non-profit mission for years to come.

It’s a good day to be a Mozillian.

Mozilla web makers round-up: Popcorn wins, Hive buzzes, youth hack

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Our new focus on moving people from using the web to making the web is generating a ton of promising new software, demos, learning resources and activity.

This post is the first in a new weekly series of round-ups that try to summarize that action, created together during our weekly Mozilla Web Maker calls.

The best of these items will feed into a new monthly “Mozilla Web Maker” newsletter. Please sign up here if you’d like to receive it.

Mozilla Popcorn named one of Top Web Developer Tools of 2011

ReadWriteWeb named Popcorn, Mozilla’s HTML5 toolkit for supercharging web video, one of its most promising web developer tools of 2011. “The future of Web media looks good.”

Help shape Hive NYC’s 2012 goals (hint: world domination)

Mozilla Hive NYC is a New York-based learning lab for Mozilla learning and education projects, helping youth acquire digital skills as they make and learn with Mozilla. Chris Lawrence writes about Hive NYC’s goals for 2012, and is seeking your input on how the organization can expand and grow.

Hive NYC is also working on a “how to” toolkit for creating a Hive-style learning network in your city, or a one-off “pop-up” style event similar to the “Hive London” event at last month’s Mozilla Festival.

Check out this fantastic video on Hackasaurus

Hack jams for youth, by youth

The Mozilla Hackasaurus team is training youth to help run hack jams for other youth, building on their recently-released Hacktivity Kit. Check out Jess Klein’s blog posts, and don’t miss these two stellar videos from youth:

 

Shakespeare goes social: Mozilla Popcorn in the classroom

Mozilla Popcorn supercharges web video, and the implications for learning and education are huge. Community member Kate Hudson’s terrific new demo shows what happens when you mash up social video and Shakespeare to create a powerful new teaching tool. The story got picked up by opensource.com.

Web making  and community building

Alina Mierlus writes about building the Mozilla community in Barcelona by bringing Mozilla’s web maker ethos to new groups:

Two years ago, Mozilla started to explore new ways to advance its mission, grow and rejuvenate the community, diversify our interest domains, and expand focus (go beyond Firefox).

Now, with programs and tools such as Hackasaurus and Popcorn that are getting stronger, and the work on Identity and Apps Ecosystem, there’s a huge opportunity to  build new community (both local and global), inspire others, and promote a new way of working and building relationships.

Stay in touch

Want to stay up to date on what the Mozilla Web Maker community is up to?

How to get yourself added to Planet Mozilla

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These people are on Planet Mozilla. Are you?

The Mozilla Foundation is growing rapidly, and producing lots of work that the rest of Mozilla wants to know more about. So I often get asked:

“Can you help <awesome new colleague> get added to Planet Mozilla?“

To make the process easier, here are some ridiculously simple instructions for accomplishing this fun and rewarding task. Soon, the entire Mozilla universe will be kept gloriously up to speed on your most important blog posts — with updates, milestones, and “a ha!” moments for miles!

“What is Planet Mozilla?”

Planet Mozilla is an aggregated blog of people working on Mozilla projects. Think of it as the main Mozilla fire hose. It’s important that you surface your most important work here for everyone to see.

For more context — and detailed instructions on getting added to Planet Mozilla — please see: “Everything you ever wanted to know about Planet Mozilla.”

“But this says I have to file a bug in Bugzilla. That sounds scary.”

I know. But don’t worry: it’s really not that bad, and nothing will break or bite.

To get added yourself to Planet Mozilla, go ahead and file your bug here. (This link makes it easy for you to file your bug in the right place.)

What do I have to include in my bug?

You clearly didn’t read “Everything you ever wanted to know about Planet Mozilla,” did you?!

The bug needs to include three things:

  1. Your blog’s URL and the URL for the feed you want included
  2. A short bio that we can use to announce your addition on the Planet Mozilla weblog
  3. Meet the approval requirements explained here.

“How do I make sure only the right posts show up on Planet Mozilla?”

Good question. You may blog about lots of stuff, but you only want the most relevant posts to show up on Planet Mozilla — so you don’t drown your colleagues with poems about your dog, reflections on Nietzche, Lego collection, etc.

We use “tagged feeds” to accomplish this. So that, for example, only blog posts you tag “Mozilla” will show up on Planet Mozilla.

“How do I figure out what the URL for my tagged feed is?”

If you’re using WordPress, there’s helpful documentation on this here.

For my own blog, for example, my “Mozilla” tagged feed is:

http://openmatt.wordpress.com/tag/mozilla-2/feed/

“Can one of my posts show up on multiple planets and blogs?”

Yes. You may end up syndicating your posts to multiple planets. So that if you tag your post “Mozilla,” “Hackasaurus,” and “Badges,” it will automatically show up on:

This makes it easy for you to ensure your posts show up in multiple relevant places, without having to manually cross-post or copy / paste, etc. It also makes it easy for you to do your writing and posting using your own personal preferred blogging tools or platform. Like WordPress, Tumblr or whatever.

“How do I get added to those other planets?”

Each planet has their own protocol and process for getting added. More documentation on other Mozilla Foundation planets will follow soon. Getting added to Planet Mozilla is the most important, so start there.

Stuck? Got questions?

  • join one of our weekly “Mozilla Web Maker” community calls and ask there. They’re open to all.
  • email me at matt [at] mozillafoundation [dot] org
  • tweet me at @openmatt

Shakespeare goes social: Mozilla Popcorn in the classroom

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What light through yonder Popcorn-powered window breaks?

What can “social video” do for learning?

The hyper-talented Kate Hudson (co-founder of openjournalism.ca, learning lab shepherd for the Knight-Mozilla project, and a designer on the Mozilla Festival data journalism handbook project) has made an outstanding “Popcorn Shakespeare” demo that highlights the potential of Mozilla Popcorn for learning and education.

I think we’re seeing the birth of a new genre of interactive film — “hyper-video,” “social video,” or pop-up video on steroids — that will revolutionize multimedia in the classroom, and maybe even the lingua franca of learning in general.

Using the web to blend moving images, interaction and context

“Popcorn Shakespeare’s” ingeniously simple user experience: watch video of a Shakespeare performance, then move your mouse away at any point to pause the playback and get help with specific terms or passages you don’t understand. (e.g., “What does ‘Hie thee hither‘ or ‘the golden round‘ mean?”) You can also dig deeper into context or notes from your instructor or peers.

But its more than a glossary tool. You can also navigate the video by clicking directly on portions of the the text (similar to Mark Boas’ work with hyperaudio). Specific terms and passages also get their own URL, so you can skip directly to specific scenes for further study — and begin to “quote” and link to video as easily as you quote text.

Morning Session

Kate Hudson at the Mozilla Festival in London last month

Delivering context and metadata only when you want it

In Tuesday’s weekly Mozilla Web Maker call (which are open to all — please join us), Kate explained that the demo was inspired by seeing other students struggle with the language in Shakespeare’s plays, and the difficulty of looking up every word in a glossary as it occurs in performance. What makes her demo so ingenious is the way she solves this problem with dead simple UX: mouse away and the video stops, mouse back and it seamlessly resumes.

That simple touch helps make the surrounding tools and context timely and relevant, avoiding the “everything but the kitchen sink” problem of many early Mozilla Popcorn demos. Instead of overwhelming viewers with too much information, Popcorn Shakespeare gives you metadata only when you want it.

Turning “lean back” couch potato-ism into “lean forward” learning and interaction

For me, Kate’s demo speaks to the larger potential of social video in the classroom: turning a formerly passive activity (video watching) into an interactive and social experience. This can allow educators to speak the multimedia language that’s native to most learners, while at the same time making it a more engaging, “lean forward” experience than sitting in a darkened room watching some one-way film.

It’s way beyond the educational videos of our youth — transforming video into a canvas for making, learning and playing with moving images and light.

Making your own social video

And of course, the goal is to make it easy for learners to make these social videos themselves, not just consume the work of others. Kate used the more developer-focused and heavy lifting Popcorn.js to produce her Shakespeare demo.  But the more user-friendly “Popcorn Maker” — which just shipped version 0.1 — aims to make it easy for non-developers, filmmakers and youth to make their own social video mash-ups as well, transforming reformed couch potatoes everywhere into web-made movie makers.  “O brave new world, / That has such people in’t!”