Robert Scoble and Shel Israel interviewed me for their book about the importance of blogging to businesses, and parts one and two of the interview are now available. Chapter 3 concerns the role blogs have played in the proliferation of products like Firefox and ICQ. As with most other interviews, this one pushed me to explore new areas I hadn’t really thought about before, and hopefully I’ll have a chance to post more about them soon; I’ve been swamped lately.
Asa, our community advocate and one of the oldest and most prominent bloggers in the Firefox community, reminded me after the interview that I didn’t mention the most important point of all: Firefox was entirely propagated through blogs when it first came out. We would put the bits on the wire and then Asa would just put a note on his blog.
March 25th, 2005 at 9:08 am
‘Firefox was entirely propagated through blogs when it first came out.’
I don’t think that’s true at all. I for one found out about Firefox (or Phoenix as it was back then) through MozillaZine. They covered it heavily (to the point where they were accused of covering it too much). Given that MozillaZine is read by far more people than any weblog, I think it had more of an impact on spreading Phoenix than the weblogs.
March 25th, 2005 at 9:59 am
@anon
MozillaZine is read by people who are interested in Mozilla and its products. Firefox got a lot of attention in lots of weblogs. So many people who were not really interested in Mozilla learnt the existence of the browser Firefox in blogs and internet news websites.
Word of mouth is still the best kind of advertisement I think. But what started the buzz over the Internet? How did firefox get picked up? Simply by being as good as it is by streamlining the browser experience? How did all those people start loving it and start spreading it in their personal blogs?
March 25th, 2005 at 11:22 am
“Anon”,
MozillaZine is run by 1-2 people, posts entries in a serial format every day and allows comments. How is it different from a blog?
-Blake
March 26th, 2005 at 6:10 pm
Were blogs even around when ICQ came out? That bit sort of confused me.