I can’t quite put my finger on why the word “irony” comes to mind here. But in any case, from a Mozilla press release:
Firefox Web Browser Advocates to Buy Full-Page Ad in the New York Times
(PRWEB) October 19, 2004 -– A group of community volunteers today launched a drive to purchase a full-page advertisement in The New York Times. The effort, endorsed by the Mozilla Foundation, will celebrate the launch of Firefox 1.0 – the Mozilla Foundation’s innovative new web browser – and include the names of thousands of small-donor contributors who will support product launch activities.
The advertisement is one component of a larger community marketing campaign, dubbed “Spread Firefox.” The campaign is the world’s largest community marketing effort ever undertaken for open source software.
The original idea for the ad campaign as well as all of the research, development and design has been done by volunteers.
In just four weeks, the SpreadFirefox.com site has swelled to coordinate the community marketing activities of close to 25,000 registered users. The site’s first goal of one million downloads of the most recent pre-release version of Firefox was surpassed within three days. To date, more than 5 million copies of the latest version of the open source web browser have been downloaded in just over one month.
“Since introducing Firefox 0.8 last February, we have seen a tremendous surge of grassroots interest to support the Firefox web browser,” said Bart Decrem, a spokesperson for the Mozilla project. “The Firefox 1.0 launch will be a celebration – both for a great new open source product and for the large open source community who made it happen.”
The New York Times ad will run following Firefox 1.0’s widespread availability this fall.
….
ABOUT SPREAD FIREFOX
Spread Firefox is the community marketing campaign of nearly 25,000 Firefox advocates worldwide. Community members can submit ideas and join volunteer teams by visiting http://www.spreadfirefox.com.
…
On the other hand, I’m all for Firefox, and pleased as hell I can now make the GDS work, for the most part, on a Mac due to it….
irony is a rhetorical device– to say one thing and actually mean another. what’s ironic here? or shouldn’t i be a stickler for the meaning of irony?
this just seems like a potentially good example of what i call “culture of participation” (borrowing from clay shirkey and tim o’reilly)
Presumably John meant it’s ironic that we’re using the old media, in fact the Old Gray Lady.
A lot of Fortune 1000 execs read the NYT, and a surprising number of ’em don’t really know about Firefox, or rather: don’t know enough about it to consider it instead of IE in their enterprises. With any luck, this ad will help spread Firefox among those who can help spread it further.
/be
Yup, that’s what I meant. Thanks Brendan, for everything!