Sarah Doherty

Always thinking. Always dreaming.

  1. Illustration Visualization from Dana Boyd’s Privacy and Publicity Keynote

  2. Firefox 3.6 & Personas: What’s Your Style?

    First off – happy download day!  Go grab a brand new shiny copy of Firefox 3.6!

    This is my second product launch since coming onboard at Mozilla.  Product launches normally involve lack of sleep and getting into the office super early.  This launch was special for me because I got to be involved in two really cool projects:

    1. Air Mozilla Streaming during Launch
    2. Personas: What’s Your Style? Photo Booth

    Air Mozilla Streaming During Launch

    We wanted to create a collaborative way to share the excitement of our 3.6 launch with the community.  Thanks to the help of Mary, Asa, Jono and Atul we were able to pull together 2.5 hours of great content on Air Mozilla.  We had cameras broadcasting both the Toronto and Mountain View offices, which allowed people to ask questions through the IRC #airmozilla channel.

    In addition to the action between Toronto and Mountain View, Jono hosted a number of wonderful 5-10 minute interviews.  Some of the interviews we conducted were:

    • Firefox Engineering – Crashkill & Improved stability with Damon Sicore
    • Evangelism – Chris Blizzard
    • Web Development – Plugin Updater with Mike Morgan
    • Marketing – Melissa Shapiro (PR) and  Tara Shahian (Making of the Personas video & “What’s your style campaign?”)
    • Build and Release Engineering with John O’Duinn and Lukas Blakk
      • A look at our process
    • Personas with Ryan Doherty and Myk Melez
    • Firebug with Rob Campbell – v1.5 released and compatible with 3.6!
    • QA with Tony Chung and  Juan Becerra

    This was a lot of fun and got the entire community involved.  We peaked at around 200 people watching through our air.mozilla.org stream and I am looking forward to putting together something similar for our next launch!

    Personas: What’s Your Style? Photo Booth

    One of the new features of Firefox 3.6 is that Personas are baked into the browser.  This allows you to easily customize your web browser right “out of the box”.  Thanks to a few of our amazing marketing community members, we started a pretty cool campaign where you can take a photo of yourself with your favorite Persona.

    I spent part of today wrangling fellow coworkers to pose with their favorite Persona by setting up a MacBook Pro with an iSight camera and using Photo Booth to grab photos.  This was a very easy to way to get everyone involved and we got a great collection of photos!  Check it out:

    This setup can easily be duplicated anywhere – think coffee shops!

    For more information on this check out the Spread Firefox page (and while your at it watch our cool Personas video!)

  3. My Personal Identity on the Web

    Personas | Metropath(ologies) | An installation by Aaron Zinman
    http://personas.media.mit.edu/

    Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.  It allows you to see how the machine is working, revealing the computer’s uncanny insights and inadvertent errors such as the characterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name.  It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world where digital histories are as important – if not more important – than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant – for now.  Fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, and this kind of data is indispensable but far from infallible.

    (I’m at least very proud that I have pretty much completely re-branded myself with my new married name so not much still exists online with my old maiden name.  It hasn’t been deleted, just renamed to “doherty”.

    This installation brings up a couple of really good points.  I’m sure we all have been shocked that someone shares the same name as us and that it is impossible to correctly search the internet for our contributions and not someone else’s.  It will be interesting to see how this problem is solved.

  4. Twitter Trending Topics

    The exciting news today is that Firefox 3.5 has been released — and you should definitely download a copy: bitly.com/firefox35

    I got into the office this morning around 7:30, which has been great to see the excitement brewing and how enthusiastic everyone is about the release. Since we do a lot of viral marketing here, we’ve been following twitter this morning and slowly watching firefox rise in the trending topics to #1 (surpassing Michael Jackson!) Please ignore Twitter clipping the “.5″ part of “3.5″ – that’s a Twitter issue not a Mozilla one :)

    Enjoy :)

    UPDATE: “Firefox 3” and “#fx35” are now listed as #1 and #2 on trending topics as of 9:06AM PDT.

  5. Seth Godin and Other Geniuses

    Today, I finally broke down and downloaded NetNewsWire for viewing RSS and Atom feeds and MarsEdit for posting oh so easily to my weblog.

    I would love some suggestions from my lovely readers as any really cool RSS feeds (including podcasts) I should be subscribing to. Hopefully you’ll help me broaden my horizons this summer.

    Before I close, I do have to mention Seth Godin for a minute. The man’s a freakin’ genius. Check his stuff out. Here’s a bit of stuff on his mind today:

    I think that the open nature of the web and the hypercompetitive environment of worldwide competition are pushing things in two different directions at the same time. First, the hyper-cheap, sort of junky stuff that discounters and others want to sell in volume. And second, the relentless pursuit of better. (RPB). RPB is the opposite of good enough. It’s not Jack Welch’s six sigma nonsense in which engineers codify mediocrity. It’s a consistent posture of changing the rules on an ongoing basis.

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