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The German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) are donating about 100,000 pictures to the Wikimedia Commons, all under a Creative Commons 3.0 by-sa (Germany) license. From the wiki page:
Starting on Thursday Dec 4, 2008, Wikimedia Commons will witness a massive upload of new images. We are anticipating about 100,000 files from a donation from the German Federal Archive. These images are mostly related to the history of Germany (including the German Democratic Republic) and are part of a cooperation between Wikimedia Germany and the Federal Archive.
(…)
To our knowledge the donation of 100,000 images is single largest one to Wikimedia Commons so far and we are very hopeful that this is only the start of a long lasting relationship that might serve as an example to other archives and image databases.
As noted elsewhere, in Germany this almost counts as the “hell freezing over”: When it comes to availability of historic documents created by the government, Germany has so far had a lot to be desired.
Among the photos uploaded so far by the import script are already some nice little gems of German history, for example:
“Feierabend”, or “calling it a day” in the GDR. The slogan at the gate reads: “100% of our staff oppose re-militarization” (one and a half years later the East German government proclaimed the need for a new national army and founded it another four years later, in 1956) and on the factory wall: “Fünfjahrplan — Friedensplan”, or “Five-Year Plan — Peace Plan”.
How about this one:
Water cannon at the border between east and west berlin, right at the Brandenburg Gate (note its pillars in the background), only a stone’s throw away from the modern-day German national parliament building. The sign reads: “Warning! You are now leaving West Berlin!” — a similar sign can still be seen at the historic “Checkpoint Charlie”.
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Thunderbird needs better t-shirts! Calling designers! We now have a great community store, where anyone can upload designs, and somehow t-shirts come out the other end. Could it be any easier?
It's late, very late, but I simply can't go to bed without sharing the happy news : the Mozilla Community Store has gone live !!!!! Congratulations to Tara, John and the whole crew for a fantastic job. The store looks great and I just can't wait to create my own shirt tomorrow. Aaah, yes, you read correctly, this store is not your typical store. Every t-shirt you will find was created by a member of the Mozilla community. You can pick your favorite design and customize it to suit your taste, or, if you want to let your creativity loose, you can start from scratch and add your own t-shirt to the store collection. Call it "open source" t-shirt shopping :)
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I wanted to let people know that there is now a Romanian version of the Mozilla brochure available. Thanks to Irina, William and Rhonda for putting this together. If anyone is interested in making the brochure available in other languages, please feel free to let me know.
As previously introduced, and subsequently rolled out in an initial test, we recently wrapped up our evaluation of a multivariate website optimization tool with a more complex test on the main Firefox product page – www.mozilla.com/firefox. We considered several variations of three components on the page – the headline, sub-headline, and text within the download button. To accomplish this, the tool had us create 16 different variations, or recipes, of our page. We then exposed these recipes to a small percentage of IE visitors to our site.
What did we find?
Some good news and some not so significant news.
The first thing we noticed was that no recipe performed significantly better than our existing Firefox product page (the control page during our test) in a statistically significant way. That said, there was one strong and valid finding. The four recipes shown below all performed significantly worse than our existing page in a statistically significant way. What’s the common thread among these four recipes?
These are the four recipes using “Try Now!” as the text within the download button. The other two variations of text used within the button were “Download” and “Free Download”.
How does this change our business/creative decision making?
As some of us already guessed, it appears that it’s the download button itself that matters most here. Thinking about the size, shape, color, and placement (among other characteristics), our findings indicate that future testing could reveal surprising – and positive findings – based on changes to the download button. In other words, it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine that future tests, that adjust such characterisitcs of the download button, could easily translate to a 2% lift (or much greater), and in turn, a substantially improved experience for millions of new Firefox users each year.
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For those interested, the full results from our test are below. The “winner” is highlighted in green and the four recipes discussed above are highlighted in red.
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I’ve just checked in a patch that means we can now check whether comm-central is building against mozilla-central or mozilla-1.9.1.
MOZILLA_1_9_1_BRANCH is now defined when we are building against mozilla-1.9.1.
The focus for Thunderbird, SeaMonkey and Calendar projects is currently building comm-central with mozilla-1.9.1 and completing the current releases we are working on.
The define will allow us to maintain builds against mozilla-central so that we don’t drift too far away from the mozilla-central development, so that when we ship our releases and go back to work against mozilla-central, we don’t have a big hit to get our applications working again.
The define is not for branching comm-central development. We will branch comm-central formally when we reach that stage.
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I’ve talked before about the so-called Support Funnel and how the Knowledge Base is the heart of SUMO, ensuring that people find solutions to the most common problems without necessarily having to interact directly with our support community. The reasons why this is important are many:
The Support Funnel. For more information, see The vision for SUMO – Part 2: Understanding the bigger picture.
So, how do we ensure that people find the solution to their problem in the Knowledge Base? Well, one way of finding the solution is by searching for it — something we try to make very obvious on the start page. The reason why we think searching is the best way of finding the solution is because the Knowledge Base is big. Really big. While we have a list of the most popular support articles right there on the start page, it’s hard to make it obvious that there is a lot more content in the Knowledge Base than what is shown on the start page.
The start page of Firefox Support, clearly emphasizing on the search function.
So, is everyone really comfortable searching? Actually, the almighty and ever so wise chofmann and I have started to see evidence that some people prefer to browse for the solution rather than searching for it. Among the people that visits the Firefox Support start page and doesn’t instantly leaves the page, only roughly half of them actually searches. The other half either clicks on one of the hand-picked popular support articles, or clicks on some other link on the page.
We’re not sure what the reason for that is, or if there are several reasons. It could be that people are unable to accurately describe the problem they’re seeing — considering how many people that are using Firefox today, this is not surprising. Even my older brother, who has been using computers for at least ten years, has problems describing some of the problems he has with his computer, and usually I have to pay him a visit, have a nice cup of coffee, and fix the problem myself.
Another reason could be that people simply prefer to browse a categorized list of articles instead of searching — essentially just clicking on a few links instead of actually typing. I talked to our creative genius John Slater a few weeks ago and he said that he’s usually a little skeptic about internal search engines and that he prefers to just browse.
Francisco Picolinni from the Mozilla Hispano community provided a third possible reason why people are unwilling to search — because they might not think anyone else has the same problem.
Regardless of why not everyone searches, it seems like we should work on providing a good way of browsing the Knowledge Base. We currently have a link at the bottom of the list of popular support articles saying “Browse all Knowledge Base topics.” However, the page that link takes you to is just a long list of all articles ordered by hit count — not exactly easy to navigate.
chofmann, John Slater and I recently brainstormed around how we could ensure that as many people as possible find the solution to their problem in the Knowledge Base with minimum effort. Since the Knowledge Base articles are loosely connected with tags like “bookmarks,” “location bar,” etc., one interesting possibility would be to show these tags in a tag cloud that would provide a better sense of the diversity of the content while still pointing to specific, popular topics. Clicking on a tag would filter the list to only show the articles with that particular tag.
A tag cloud around the topic Web 2.0.
Another problem to solve is making sure that people really understand that they can browse for solutions as an alternative to searching. We want people to understand that Firefox Support has the answer to their problems and that they should stay on the site until the problem is solved. This probably means we have to take a closer look at how the start page is designed to see how we can better communicate this. If you have ideas on how we can achieve this, we are interested in hearing them!
What we really want a user with a problem with Firefox to feel when visiting Firefox Support is: “These people are here for me, and they won’t give up until my problem is solved.”
We just started to work on this, so stay tuned for more…
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