Planet SpreadFirefox

What would you like Mozilla to do? (What does "develop community tagging recommendations" mean? Create a set of recommended subject areas to tag?)

How would you like Mozilla to promote these? 

Thanks for responding. 

I'd like Mozilla to post suitable messages in suitable locations. The first message would invite a discussion of tagging. Something like (but better worded):

There's a lot of Mozilla info out there. It's all over the place. There are some attempts to aggregate, eg planet.mozilla.org, but some of us think we could be doing a lot better if we formally adopted some recommendations related to tags.

(Given that many tools that generate URLs (eg blogging tools) already enable tagging, and given that anyone can add any tag to any URL anyway, and given that it's trivial to aggregate based on those tags, including arbitrary algebras (eg "match URLs tagged 'thunderbird' AND 'mac'"), it could revolutionize our organization of the disparate info out there if we began to adopt suitable tagging conventions, tools, workflows, etc.)

Let's talk.

Provided this discussion is fruitful, in the sense it leads to a set of rough consensus recommendations, I'd like Mozilla to post those recommendations in suitable locations.

What marketing goal would this drive? Organizing the disparate info out there - lovely. But to what end? No intent to belabor the discussion, just genuinely curious how you think this initiative aids growing the user base for Firefox.

> to what end?

Where to begin? 

I'll start with an abstract view.

I believe suitable organization of information is a key tool for fostering organizational performance improvements. I believe organizational performance improvement is a key tool for increasing the likelihood of reaching an organization's goals (and even enabling those goals to be increased).

(It sounds like, in your view of Mozilla.com's driving logic, all goals are subordinated to the objective of growing the user base, so that objective would be what is ultimately impacted. Fwiw I see community objectives that are independent of, and as important as, growing the user base. But what the goal or objective is is not relevant to the abstract case I've just made.)

I'll continue with a concrete view.

If Mozillans knew that tagging an URL was the canonical way to expose one of the URLs out there to those interested in it, e.g. that tagging an URL with "firefox" and "support" and "faq" was probably or definitely going to get that URL exposed to those interested in FAQs about Firefox support, I believe more and more Mozillans would do that, and that the Mozilla Firefox support community would reap the significant benefits outlined in the abstract case I made above.

Continuing, a Mozillan, or a Mozilla sub-community, focused on Mac support could choose to view URLs tagged "mac" AND ("thunderbird" OR "firefox").

There's the potential of the tag teams I've written about before.

And so on.

To summarize: tags are a very powerful tool for organizing decentralized web info; tags seem ideally suited to solving evident problems in Mozilla's information universe (eg Rafael's) and creating new opportunities (eg empowering those focused on Mac support); and the MoCo effort that would be involved in suitably encouraging tagging seems likely to be tiny in comparison with the potentially enormous pay off. Indeed, if you simply said "ok, you write the initial post and we'll work with you until it's ready to post it with an official imprimatur", you'll have done most of what I'd like to see you do.

Write the initial post and we'll work with you until it's ready to post it with an official imprimatur. :-)
 

 > Write the initial post and we'll work with you until it's ready to post it with an official imprimatur. :)

I posted a (strawmanish) draft earlier (in a comment above this one). If it's terrible, that's fine. I've got to start somewhere and I can quickly improve it if I get good feedback such as concrete criticism by someone who at least gets and agrees with the basic idea. I'd be especially delighted if chris beard dropped in and commented. 

Right now I'm focused on my community and the upcoming Transformus 2007 (a local Burning Man). I anticipate getting back on the tagging case in a week or two.

I believe the new SFX will incorporate (free) tagging, or at least pervasive links to the likes of del.icio.us. It would make a lot of sense to talk about the potential of tagging, and maybe write some recommendations, before the roll out of the upcoming SFX2.

love, change (aka raiph)

I'll send you feedback this week. Much appreciate the discussion. Good luck with Transformus!

I'm back from a burned-into-my-brain Transformus 2007.

I haven't seen feedback here or via email.

Here's a draft that focuses on pmo:

Do you read planet.mozilla.org? Would you like to be able see a stream of posts like that, but filtered by tag? (For example, viewing just posts tagged 'marketing', or 'mac', or 'marketing+mac'.)

Do you write blogs included in planet.mozilla.org? Does your blog software support tags?

I see planet.mozilla.com as being everything mozilla related.  I see planet.spreadfirefox as being more spreadfirefox/marketing related, i.e. a little more focused.  All the random and engineering stuff on planet.mozilla is too much.  It was ok when there was a few people on there, but now it's too random and not focused/not really that useful. 

Long time ago we were thinking that the blog system for spreadfirefox would go away and we'd do the blog aggregation via planet.spreadfirefox and let people post on their own blogs or use some other system versus hosting blogs via spreadfirefox.  That was a couple years ago though.

Just a suggestion.