Here’s something I read in a blog post by Esther Dyson, where she describes a visit to Russia in which she was asked for advice on how to spur innovation in the country: In fact, I started my discussion with Russia's government leaders by talking about my experiences as chair of NASA's Innovation and Technology advisory committee. The issue, I said, was not really about funding technology innovation; it is how to create a culture that rewards thoughtful innovation and considers mistakes the price of learning. ... Read more

I’ve been involved in the judging pipeline for three competitions now. Today, I judged for an inspiring competition called Node Knockout, held by Joyent and Fortnight Labs. The first two competitions I participated in didn’t scale. I wasn’t even a judge for the first one—we had a tiny handful of celebrity judges who couldn’t possibly review all of the submissions, so me and some colleagues furiously attempted to cull the list down for them. ... Read more

I’ve recently been proud and inspired to see two new features land in the latest Firefox 4 betas: Web developers can now access the raw audio data in <audio> and <video> elements, and Firefox Panorama helps users manage their tabs. In his excellent post Experiments with audio, conclusion, Dave Humphrey mentions the following Tweet from Joe Hewitt: Bottom line: we can currently only move as fast as employees of browser makers can go, and our imagination is limited by theirs. ... Read more

On Friday I attended CrisisCamp Silicon Valley. I didn’t really know what to expect, since I was unfamiliar with the nascent field of internet-facilitated crisis response and was unable to find a high-level overview of how people—both techies and non-techies—can really make an impact. The Bird's Eye View As I understand it, this is the big picture of internet-facilitated crisis response: People on the ground in a disaster are told, through various channels, to report what they're seeing to the public through a variety of media: SMS, Twitter, Facebook, whatever's easiest and most understandable for them. ... Read more

The New York Times recently wrote that The Web Means The End of Forgetting. I never kept a copy of my first public software project with me—yet because I put it on the internet, it eventually made its way into an FTP archive, many mirrors of which still host the files sixteen years later, when a casual conversation with a friend prompted me to search for them. In 1994, I didn’t like Macintosh computers, so I decided to replace the explosive barrels in DOOM with them. ... Read more

Early this year, I had to start using Mozilla’s Bugzilla, an issue tracker that, while incredibly powerful, nonetheless confused and intimidated me to no small degree. One of my most basic needs was to have a simple display containing bugs of interest to me. I couldn’t find a page in the product that satisfied me, so I used Gervase Markham’s excellent Bugzilla REST API to create an HTML page that fetched the information I needed and displayed it. ... Read more

Earlier this year I read Don Norman’s Emotional Design, and I’ve been reflecting on some of the reasons I decided to start using Firefox back in 2004. When I hear most people talk about why they used Firefox, they sound pretty rational. They liked Firefox because it stopped pop-ups; it had tabs; or because it was faster than Internet Explorer. My recollections of my first impressions of Firefox involved some of those things, but I mostly remember having a positive emotional reaction to the product. ... Read more

Context offers fodder for innovation. Hidden in the physical work space, in the users' words, and in the tools they use are the beautiful gems of knowledge that can create revolutionary, breakthrough products or simply fix existing, broken products. —Jon Kolko, Thoughts on Interaction Design I’ve been talking with my colleague Jinghua Zhang, the project lead for Mozilla’s Test Pilot program, about the usefulness of ethnography and qualitative research in user interface design, and it seems like something that could both strengthen Mozilla’s community and help make our products easier to use. ... Read more

I’ve heard some talk lately, primarily from Henri Sivonen, regarding whether Google’s notion of an Installable Web App is “webby”. I am not sure exactly what webby means, but if I had to guess, it would involve the kinds of qualities that Mitchell Baker and Mark Surman believe make the web better: more transparent, participatory, decentralized, and hackable. Though I’m not fully sold on these newfangled apps, I can think of three ways that they could make the web better. ... Read more

I wanted to quickly illuminate what one might call the flip side of the Open To Choice campaign, which is summarized by this Publishers Weekly review of Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice (2004): Like Thoreau and the band Devo, psychology professor Schwartz provides ample evidence that we are faced with far too many choices on a daily basis, providing an illusion of a multitude of options when few honestly different ones actually exist. ... Read more