Thinking about the Open Web

I’ve been thinking about how to talk to people about what the Open Web is, why it’s so important, and why they should care.

The Open Web as a global public resource

It struck me that the Open Web is analogous to some other fundamentally vital things in our society:

• public libraries
• public schools
• public parks
• public broadcasting
• public roads
• public art
• public museums
• public galleries
• etc.

Many of these things are deemed so vital a part of our everyday lives and societal infrastructure that we support them through our tax dollars. Others are supported by concerned citizens who believe so deeply in their importance that they donate not only their hard-earned money, but also their time, skills, and creativity.

The Web is an increasingly important part of our lives, and it is absolutely essential that it remain free and open and accessible to all. If it doesn’t — if the Web becomes closed, restricted, controlled, and inaccessible to anyone who is disadvantaged or marginalized in some way — our whole, global society will suffer as a result. The Web cannot become something that further delineates the haves from the have-nots. It is already far too important for that, and it is still only in its infancy.

Mozilla exists to support the Open Web

Mozilla is an organization devoted to ensuring that the Web continue to develop as and remain a global public resource — akin to libraries, schools, parks, and roads — and everything we do, every resource at our disposal, is focused towards this end. This is the absolute core of our mission as outlined in the Mozilla Manifesto, and it is the heart of everything we strive towards.

Why Mozilla makes a browser

Making a browser is one of the most important things Mozilla currently does — not as an end unto itself, but rather in support of our larger mission and goals.

The browser is by far the most important tool we use to create and consume the Web. Without an open browser there is no Open Web. This is why we build Firefox, and why we’re pushing hard to get Firefox on to as many devices and desktops as we can. The Open Web is an increasingly crucial part of our lives and our society, and Firefox is one way we’re working to ensure that the Web remain open and available for everyone.

What do you think?

Is this a useful way to think about and talk about the Open Web to people who might not quite get what we’re so excited about? Not everyone is going to grok the analogy in the same way — and this certainly isn’t the only way to talk about it — but I think that most people understand that public works are a good thing, and that ensuring open and equitable access to fundamental resources and infrastructure — which now includes the Open Web — is an essential part of a just and civilised society.

Also, if you have photos posted but don’t use Flickr, please leave a comment here with a link to where you’ve hosted them. Thanks!

1. Copy/paste these rules and questions into a blog post, answer the questions, then tag some other people (however many you like) and encourage them to do the same.
2. Include a link to the original post.
3. You don’t have to be tagged to take part — if you see this post and want to play, just dive on in. Simple!

How (and when) did you originally get involved with an open source project? Which projects have you contributed to?

I first got involved with open source-related stuff in 1999 when I started Linuxchix (still going) and the Open Source Writers Group (long since dead). In addition to those, I’ve contributed to the PA-RISC/Linux project (about forty million years ago), and the Mozilla project, plus little fiddly-bits here and there.

Why did you choose to contribute to an open source project?

Because I could. I had been using Linux for a few years at that point and I loved it — I loved the community and the openness and everything else about it. When I realized that I had the skills and ability to make real and useful contributions, I got involved. Linux and the open source community had given me a lot, and I wanted to give back however I could.

If you were to pick one or two people who have had a major influence on your involvement with open source, who would those people be? Why?

Chris Beard: Some 10 or 11 years ago, I read about Chris and the Puffin Group (a small Linux consulting company) on Slashdot and sent Chris (a complete stranger) an email asking for a job. He hired me. This is a pretty short story for what has ended up being a decade-long friendship. I have an enormous amount of respect for Chris and the work he does — easily one of the most visionary and driven people I’ve had the privilege of working with.

Mike Shaver: Some 10 or 11 years ago, I met shaver the day before his wedding to which he immediately invited me (a complete stranger). I declined, and I regret that decision to this day because Mike has turned out to be one of my best friends. I’m going to stop now because I’ll just get teary-eyed, and it would take more than a few hours to talk about how his friendship has (actually, and for reals) changed my life.

Both Chris and Mike are why I’m part of Mozilla now, and I believe I still owe them both a beer or two for that.

How have you personally benefited from being involved with open source projects?

Getting involved with open source turned into a career for me. Mozilla, in particular, has been spectacular because this project encourages people to push beyond themselves and to reach for and learn new things all the time. I’ve learned more and done more in the past five years of being involved with Mozilla than I would have been able to do in any traditional organization, had I been able to wedge a foot in the door.

Not only has it become a career, being involved with open source has (as I foreshadowed before) lead to some of my deepest and most lasting friendships. It turns out that open source projects are a fantastic way to meet like-minded (but oh-so-entertainingly diverse) people. I know, talk to, and work with incredibly brilliant and passionate people all over the world, every day. I wouldn’t trade this for anything.

What advice and/or encouragement would you give to someone who is considering getting involved with an open source project?

Do it! Get involved. Persevere. Step up. Be brave. It can be awfully intimidating and overwhelming when you first start out, but don’t give up. Find some niche where you can make a contribution, then just get started. It could be the best thing you’ve ever done.

• Chris Beard
• Mike Shaver
• David Humphrey
• Lukas Blakk
• Mike Morgan

The rules:

1. Copy/paste these rules and questions into a blog post, answer the questions, then tag some other people (however many you like) and encourage them to do the same.
2. Include a link to the original post.
3. You don’t have to be tagged to take part — if you see this post and want to play, just dive on in. Simple!

The questions:

1. How (and when) did you originally get involved with an open source project? Which projects have you contributed to?
2. Why did you choose to contribute to an open source project?
3. If you were to pick one or two people who have had a major influence on your involvement with open source, who would those people be? Why?
4. How have you personally benefited from being involved with open source projects?
5. What advice and/or encouragement would you give to someone who is considering getting involved with an open source project?

That’s it! I’ll post my own responses soon :)

It might sound sort of silly or contrived, but it turns out that a simple note of appreciation really can have a huge impact. Since I’ve started using Rypple to send out kudos, I’ve received a few notes from folks telling me that I’ve basically made their day. It’s a little thing, and doesn’t really take more than a couple of minutes out of your day, but it can really make a difference. We don’t often get genuine, heartfelt, positive feedback, so it’s really incredibly energizing when we do.

Everyone with a Rypple account (which is anyone, since everyone can sign up) can log in and send kudos to anyone with an email address. It’s totally wide open and anyone can do it — so if you have a few minutes sometime today, think of someone who’s done something awesome, head over to Rypple, and send them a kudos. The more you do it, the more fun it becomes.

So, in addition to getting new content produced to help people, I’m going to start collecting existing materials together and figuring out how to make those easier to find and use.

I’ve created a new page on wiki.mo called Learning Mozilla, listing on it some of the useful things I already know about. Now I need your help: if you know of other resources that would be useful for someone who wants to learn more about Mozilla, please take a few moments to add it to the page or leave a note (with a URL) in the comments here.

Anything and everything is great — I’ll dig for more content as I can, and I’ll take it upon myself keep the page cleaned up and organized, so don’t worry too much about where to list things or how to format stuff. Just add the links and we’ll sort out the rest as we go.

On the other hand, positive feedback is absolutely energizing. Those moments where someone goes out of their way to say “thanks” or “awesome job” or “you rock” really does make it all worthwhile. Feeling appreciated — knowing that someone genuinely cares about and values the work you do — can often make the difference between something being a burden or a joy. For me, receiving positive feedback is the most powerful motivator out there — more so than money, fame, or anything else.

Rypple (which we use at Mozilla) recently built a new feedback mechanism into their service called “kudos” that you can use to send someone a quick “thanks”, “you’re awesome”, or “you rock” sort of message. The message you send is visible to everyone in the organization, so serves as a public note of appreciation. Other people can comment on the kudos as well, so there’s a way to quickly add a “+1″ or otherwise pile on the love. You can read more about the Rypple kudos feature (and an ongoing contest they’ve launched to promote it) over at WorkplaceHero.com.

The Rypple kudos system really is fantastic. We don’t often go out of our way to publicly acknowledge the awesome things our coworkers do, but Rypple has given us a fun, fast, simple, lightweight, and unintimidating way to do so. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you should — take a minute to send a kudos and make someone’s day :)

So far, people have suggested the following:

• Lifecycle of a Bug – introduction to the stages involved in fixing a bug from start to end
• Building Firefox – introduction to getting the Firefox source code and compiling it, while going over the basics of hg
• Test Frameworks – introduction to the different test frameworks we use, and how to write a basic test in each of them
• Drinking from the Firehose – how to stay on top of the news, difference between “stream of development and ideas” and “announcments”, how to understand things like what the next milestone is
• Bugzilla for Developers: Getting your patch into the product – how to nom for review; how to determine if you need to nom for approval, blocking, etc.; writing tests; checkin wrangling; watching the tree.
• Gaining Traction – how to publish that wicked cool idea you have; how to rally people around it to see if there’s interest; moving from idea to implementation
• How to navigate the code using MXR/DXR
• How to use and contribute to MDC
• Writing your first automated test
• How to do your own screencasts/videos
• Mozilla Developer Tools & Workflow
• How to optimize edit/compile/test loops
• Presentation tips & tricks

What other screencasts or video introductions do you think would be useful for learning Mozilla and getting involved with the project and community?

Before Readability

After Readability

Note: Readability runs fine on Minefield if you use Nightly Tester Tools to force-install. There’s also a bookmarklet version if you don’t want to install an add-on.

One of the most important parts of my week is my one-on-one (1:1) meeting with Dan, my manager. These meetings generally only last around half an hour, and it’s time extraordinarily well spent. In that half hour we catch up, discuss projects and status, review priorities, troubleshoot blockers, checkpoint against our quarterly goals, and use the time to give each other feedback. It might sound like a pretty dense 30 minutes, and that’s because it is. Our 1:1 meeting is a tightly packed conversation that establishes and reinforces my direction, priorities, and motivation. As a remotie*, I would be lost without it.

The actual meeting is only part of the story, however — while the meeting only lasts for half an hour, I do some prep work the day before. This prep work mostly involves reviewing my projects and goals, writing out what I want to talk about, and sending those notes to Dan so he can review them before we meet. I find this process extremely useful.

Over the months I’ve established a more-or-less standard format for my 1:1 prep notes that includes five fairly straightforward sections:

• Accomplishments & status
• Blocked/Waiting on
• To do over the next week
• Areas to develop
• Quarterly goal tracking

Accomplishments & status: This is where I do a quick rundown of my current projects, with one or two sentences covering what I’ve managed to get done in the last week and what the current status looks like.

Blocked/Waiting on: This is where I list the projects I’m stuck on and why, or other things that are blocking progress — either waiting on resources, people, feedback, or whatever else. Having this section is absolutely vital — if I’m blocked on something, we can usually talk it through so I get unstuck, or Dan can figure out what he can do to help.

To do over the next week: By writing out a short list of specific things I plan to work on over the next week, Dan and I can make sure that I’m working on the right things and am prioritizing things properly. This doesn’t take a lot of time to go over, and since we checkpoint on this every week there usually aren’t any changes, but sometimes my task list gets rejigged slightly if other things have come up elsewhere in the organization.

Areas to develop: Usually this is a one or two sentence “big picture” sort of thing. Dan and I talk about longer-term career development once every month or two, discussing what I need to do or develop in order to progress, become more effective, and have more impact. In this part of my prep notes I take a few minutes to review how I think I’m doing in relation to what we discussed and jot down what I believe I need to focus on improving the most.

This section gives Dan a chance to do some career development coaching. While we normally deal with this part of the meeting in a matter of minutes, it’s profoundly useful — this is an incredibly quick and easy way for me to get ongoing lightweight feedback from Dan on a regular basis.

Quarterly goal tracking: We establish a set of goals each quarter, and every week Dan and I review progress on the ones I own and am driving. I find this useful because regularly checkpointing against my goals helps me make sure I’m focusing on the right things. By reviewing these weekly, we can also make ongoing course corrections where needed. Life rarely happens exactly according to plan, and priorities and projects can shift. It’s far better to review and adjust things weekly than to do a single review late in the quarter just to realize that things got off track (at which point the panic sets in).

Video chat: Another thing I should mention is that Dan and I have our meetings using Skype video. We used to just use the phone, but Dan talked me into using video chat and it’s really much, much better. As a remotie, being able to get “face time” like this is way more important than I thought — not only is the communication much higher bandwidth, there’s a psychological impact I can’t really explain. I just feel more connected to the rest of the company, which is both surprising and fantastic. If you’re remote, you should really try using video chat for your 1:1 meetings…I can almost guarantee that it’s more useful than you expect.

And that’s about it. Having developed the habit of prepping for my 1:1 meetings this way, it only takes me about 15-20 minutes to write up my notes to send to Dan, and it makes our meetings incredibly focused and useful. If you’re not sure you’re getting the most out of your 1:1s, you might try something like this — a half hour of prep work on your part for a half hour meeting can have a huge impact.

Do you have particularly awesome 1:1 meetings? What makes them awesome? What tips would you give to people who would like their meetings to be more useful?

• remotie: noun, a person who works in a different geographic location than his/her manager.

Here, for example, is a screenshot of what a typical Harvard Business Review article looks like in Firefox (Persona: Save the Bees Plz by monorail cat):

Old Crufty

With the Readability add-on installed, all I have to do is hit a quick keyboard shortcut (alt-cmd-R) and the page will reload and be reformatted by Readability. It looks like this:

New Clean

It’s just so, so much better. arc90, you have made a great thing. Thanks :)

The premise is fairly simple: You can help make the world a better place by finding and mentoring someone who you feel has amazing potential and help make them as successful as possible (ideally, of course, to be “greater than yourself”).

The greatest, most successful and well-respected leaders that I’ve encountered in my two decades of consulting, advising, writing, and speaking are not just helpful: they’ve come to understand that the true measure of their greatness as leaders is their ability to develop leaders who go on to surpass them — who rise to a level greater than themselves in skill, influence and ability.
– Steve Farber

The article outlines six pieces of advice to help you get started, which are expanded upon (in a roundabout way) in the book. It’s a fantastic premise, but I’d be curious to see how it works in action. The book doesn’t really get into a whole lot more detail — it’s written as a parable which makes for a quick read but glosses over the nitty-gritty. Worth reading, either way.

It turns out that extrinsic incentives — the old “carrots and sticks” system of punishments and rewards — really don’t motivate us very much at all. This isn’t to say that things like money, benefits, promotions, and bonuses aren’t important, but science tells us that after a certain level (i.e. when pay is already fair and equitable), extrinsic motivators aren’t really all that effective.

True motivation is something at once more simple and more complex. Intrinsic incentives — those motivations that come from within and are part of our fundamental character and make up — are the real reason we strive to excel, why we take such satisfaction in producing exceptional work, and are what lie behind our real passions and drives.

Pink postulates that there are three elements to intrinsic motivation: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.

The first element, Autonomy, is based on the observation that people are more likely to be engaged in and passionate about something if they are free to be self-directed — allowed not only to choose what they work on, but to find their own solutions, strategies, and approaches to the work involved. Pink puts forth “four Ts” where autonomy and self-direction matter: task, time, technique, and team.

Compare these two situations: In the first, you are asked to work on a project you select, on your own schedule, using methods you choose, and with a team that you recruit. In the second, you are asked to work on something you’re not interested in, on a schedule someone else sets, using methods you have no influence over, and with people you can’t trust, don’t like, and find difficult to work with. Which would you find more motivating? Where would you do your best work? Autonomy is an absolutely fundamental part of motivation.

Mastery, Pink’s second element, is based on his belief that we each have an innate “desire to get better and better at something that matters”. This drive is what lies behind that seemingly magical state known as “flow” — where time falls away when you’re working on a clear task that is just challenging enough without being frustratingly difficult. When our tasks are just slightly beyond our current level of mastery we are inspired to push ourselves to get better and accomplish ever greater things.

The third element, Purpose, provides a grounding context for the other two. “Autonomous people working toward mastery perform at very high levels. But those who do it in the service of some greater objective can achieve even more.” If you believe that what you’re doing has a purpose larger than yourself — say, as an example, ensuring there is choice and innovation on the internet and safeguarding the future of the open web — you’re going to be even more motivated to accomplish amazing things.

The book mentions both Wikipedia and Firefox as examples of what people can accomplish when driven solely by intrinsic motivation. All three elements are present: contributors are autonomous (entirely self-selecting and able to scratch whatever itches they like), highly skilled and driven to continually get better at what they do, and they usually have a pretty fundamental belief in the purpose and importance of the larger project. Working together over several years, the people involved with these projects have accomplished what most sane people would have believed was impossible only a few years ago. Intrinsic motivation is powerful, powerful thing.

If you’re interested in understanding the power of intrinsic incentives (and, to some extent, the dangers of extrinsic incentives) and harnessing those to motivate your team or open source community to even greater feats of awesome, I think Drive is definitely worth reading.

Luckily Rob taught me a trick to open up some space in my Firefox toolbar. Just right-click in the space beside your search bar, select Customize…, then add some “Spacers” where you want some extra space. Here’s a step by step guide, using the Two Little Birds persona:

1. Sad birdies, search bar in the way.

2. Right click beside the search bar and select Customize…

3. Open up the Customize menu…

4. Add some spacers, and remove some buttons to free up space…

5. Ta dah! No more sad birdies.

This is something the Planet team was discussing prior to the holidays, but we hadn’t picked it up again until prompted by Matt’s post. It turns out that we should be able to rig the existing Planet software to do more or less what Matt suggests, we’re just not currently sure how well the software will deal with a large number of channels.

I figure we may as well start by defining the ideal and work backwards from it if we run into technical limitations. I’ve expanded upon Matt’s proposed category list, and started defining a set of keywords and keyphrases that the Planet software would use to filter posts into each category.

I’ve posted that list on the Mozilla wiki, and would like your feedback and help. What categories are missing? Which could be safely consolidated? What other keywords should we filter on for each? Etc. You can edit that page directly if you like, or leave a comment on this post. Thanks!

Planet Mozilla policies

The policies are minimal and relatively straightforward, but if you have any questions please feel free to leave a comment here or to email any/all of the Planet Mozilla team (listed on the wiki page).

If you’ve never heard of it, Project Gutenberg (Wikipedia page) is an almost entirely volunteer-driven effort to digitize, archive, and distribute “cultural works” (mostly books). It was established in 1971 and now includes over 30,000 free ebooks that you can read on a wide variety of devices including computers, cellphones, various mobile devices, and ebook readers.

Project Gutenberg contains some amazing, unparalleled works of literature and it is an incredibly valuable resource that just doesn’t seem to get the credit (and support) it deserves. This challenge has two purposes:

1) To inspire people to read some of these wonderful old classics, and
2) To support Project Gutenberg.

Here’s the challenge

1) Set a goal: Pick a number of Project Gutenberg books you think you could read over the next year. This can be anything from a conservative 2 or 3, a more ambitious one per month, or a hardcore no-holds-barred one per week. The number is entirely up to you. Post a quick comment here if you would like to make your goal public!

2) Make a donation: Donate a few dollars to Project Gutenberg. I’m going to donate $2 for each book in my goal, but that’s just a suggestion. Just try to send ‘em a couple of bucks if you can.

3) Find some books and start reading. Each time you finish a book, blog a quick review of it, fire off a tweet about it, or post to Facebook about it. Encourage other folks to play along, donate a few dollars, and read some of these amazing pieces of literature. Project Gutenberg is a great and under-appreciated project that is doing some fantastic work, so let’s show ‘em some love.

Not sure where to start?
Here’s a quick baker’s dozen of some of the fantastic books available through Project Gutenberg:

• Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin
• Walden, Henry David Thoreau
• Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
• The Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin
• Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery
• Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
• Dracula, Bram Stoker
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
• A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
• Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Jacob and Whilhelm Grimm
• Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
• Harvard Classics bookshelf (for a real challenge)

Stickers!

Here are some stickers you can put on your weblog if you decide to participate. Link the sticker to this blog post, and we’ll see how many people we can get reading some old classics and supporting Project Gutenberg.

* Disclaimers: I’m doing this just for fun. I am in no way associated with Project Gutenberg, and they have no idea I’m doing this. Having read their legalese I think I’m ok calling this the “Project Gutenberg Project”, but I didn’t ask for their permission (so the name may change!) If you decide to donate, please go to the Project Gutenberg site, and follow their directions.

Very cool original stamp graphic is from Wikipedia and is in the public domain.

Happy reading!

Planet Mozilla survey.

Thanks!

The Planet Mozilla team would like your help. Planet Mozilla is a central and vital part of the Mozilla Community, but we think it could be better. We’re looking for your input on what you think Planet is (or should be) for, how well it’s fulfilling that purpose, and how it could be improved or augmented to better serve our community.

Please take a few minutes of your time to answer our three short questions about Planet Mozilla. We really want as much feedback as possible, so you can also leave comments on this blog post if you have other questions, comments or insights about Planet or other Planet-related things. Thanks!

Planet Mozilla survey.

The Planet Mozilla team would like your help. Planet Mozilla is a central and vital part of the Mozilla Community, but we think it could be better. We’re looking for your input on what you think Planet is (or should be) for, how well it’s fulfilling that purpose, and how it could be improved or augmented to better serve our community.

Please take a few minutes of your time to answer our three short questions about Planet Mozilla. We really want as much feedback as possible, so you can also leave comments on this blog post if you have other questions, comments or insights about Planet or other Planet-related things. Thanks!

Planet Mozilla survey.

Please take a few minutes of your time to answer our three short questions about Planet Mozilla. We really want as much feedback as possible, so you can also leave comments on this blog post if you have other questions, comments or insights about Planet or other Planet-related things. Thanks!

Planet Mozilla survey.

Thanks!

“One of the tough truths of management is that we all have trouble making choices. While older and supposedly wiser, we still often act like kids in the candy store who want everything. Some of the best CEOs and managers are those who stop things and get their companies or their teams focused. GE’s Chief Learning Officer, Susan Peters, notes that for successful managers at GE ‘prioritization and focus are keys to doing well. Sure there are other things that are not on the priority list, but you do them differently or more slowly.’”

Motivation – you’re doing it wrong (TEDTalk)

Dan Pink’s TED Talk about the science of motivation, and how there is a mismatch between what science knows and what businesses often do to motivate people. “Dan’s point is that rewarding performance mostly doesn’t work and often leads to worse performance.” The interesting part really starts around the 12:00m mark, where he stops talking about how rewards don’t work and starts talking about what does — autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

How to Escape Perfectionism (Harvard Business blogs)

“Critical feedback is helpful as long as it’s offered with care and support. But the feedback that comes from jealousy or insecurity or arrogance or without any real knowledge of you? Ignore it. And if you’re a manager, your first duty is to do no harm. As managers, we’re often the ones who stand in judgment of other people and their work. And when we’re too hard on someone or watch too closely or correct too often or focus on the mistakes more than the successes, then we sap their confidence. And without confidence, no one can achieve much.”

Anyhow, the problem is that it turns out that asking for and giving feedback can be difficult. Asking a good question is a lot harder than I thought, and giving useful and constructive feedback is complicated by a whole variety of factors. I generally learn by reading, so I’ve started digging around and reading as much as I can about feedback. I figured I’d start linking to the interesting stuff I find, in case other people might find it useful as well.

A bunch of this first batch are from the Rypple weblog, which is a good place to poke around — there’s lots of interesting stuff over there.

• Good vs. Bad Questions (Rypple)
• How to avoid dead-end questions (Rypple)
• How will I be perceived if I ask for feedback? (Rypple)
• Good feedback, bad feedback (Rypple)
• The double meaning of ‘feedback’ (HBR)
• Find the gold in toxic feedback (HBR)

Promotion and growth

Recently, Alix Franquet arranged for the about:mozilla newsletter to be featured as one of the Firefox Start Page snippets. Prior to this, the newsletter had plateaued at around 2800 email subscribers (plus an unknown number of readers via the web and feeds), increasing by maybe 10-20 subs per week. Since being added to the start page, however, the number of email subscribers has exploded to 6800, and the number continues to grow by 300-500 subscribers every week. A million, million thanks to Alix for helping promote the newsletter like this.

Content and length

The newsletter has also been getting longer as the Mozilla Project continues to grow both in the sheer number of contributors and the number of projects being undertaken. I’m going to experiment with slightly increasing the number of stories mentioned while paring down a little on the number of words I write per piece, to see how that works.

Experimental source feed

I’ve also started an experimental “Source feed” of sorts. Each week, while I read through the various Mozilla-related news sources, I flag possible items for newsletter inclusion by starring them in Google Reader. A few weeks ago I also started “sharing” those items, so you can now see a raw feed of Mozilla news stories, mentions, and blog posts that I’m thinking about including in the newsletter. I’m not sure whether it will be useful or not, but someone asked if I could put it together, so here it is.

That’s about it for now. If you have any questions or suggestions about the newsletter, please feel free to leave a comment here or email me at deb-at-mozilla-dot-com.

1. What is your reading schedule? Do you have a schedule?

When I first get up in the morning, I start reading through email while the coffee brews. Once I get a coffee, I finish email (flagging stuff for later response, not responding as I go), then move on to read Twitter scrollback (rarely all of it), then forums, then finally moving on to feeds.

Feeds are the bulk of incoming stuff, and I have them cordoned off into folders that are ordered by general relevance. High priority stuff (work-related, generally, and friends/smart people) I check in on several times a day, Mid priority stuff is once a day or once every couple of days, and Low priority is once/wk at best. Low priority stuff often gets dumped unread when I declare a “Mark All Read” day :)

I don’t have a formal schedule — I’m online more or less all day, every day (except for the gym and the pub) and I just dive in and out of various communications streams randomly.

2. What do you read daily, and how often?

• Email: many times/day, usually flipping to that tab once or twice per hour.
• IRC: Constantly. I realized the other day that except for vacations and whatnot, I’ve been on IRC more or less every day since sometime in 1993. And I’m OK with that. IRC is like Twitter — profoundly simple, and so much more than the sum of its parts.
• Twitter: I am utterly fascinated by Twitter and I love it and I’m not sure why. Its immediacy and continual flow creates a sense of connectedness that strikes me as somewhat magical. I’ve been feeling these wires for a long time, and Twitter is something brand new that feels oldskool and important. The ambient awareness it enables is quite something. Very interested to see what develops there. Anyhow, I’m on Twitter all the damned time. Even out and about (but not at the gym).
• IM: When they come in. IM is real time, and I wish people used it more. It’s basically private IRC.
• Planet Mozilla + other Mozilla-related feeds: 4-5 times/day. I flag items for inclusion in the weekly about:mozilla newsletter throughout the week as I do this, compiling the final selection and writing it up every Monday.
• “Friends”, “People”, “Smart”, and “Work stuff” folders: once or twice/day. “Friends” stuff I generally read then and there (and has a pretty deep overlap between ‘work’ and ‘non-work’), but other stuff I’ll flag for later reading in bulk. (“People” and “Smart” is stuff that isn’t directly work related, but that is peripherally so; “Work stuff” is non-Mozilla stuff that is relevant to my specific job.)
• “Fun” folder: I’ll flip through my “Fun” folder if I have 5 mins to kill or need a break. It’s full of internet awesomeness like Cute Overload, I Can Has Cheeseburger, Overheard in NY, Passive-aggressive notes, etc. Pretty much guaranteed to make me laugh at least a few times/day, which is more valuable than gold.

3. What do you read more than once / week? How often?

• Stuff I’ve flagged for later reading when skimming through feeds.
• “Tech”, “Tech blogs”, “Web”, and “News” folders. There is way too damned much traffic in these to try to stay on top of them daily, but I usually skim through them a couple of times/wk. I skim pretty brutally, tho, and probably flag maybe 1 or 2 posts for every 50-100 that come in.

4. What blogs, feeds, and newsgroups do you read?
Blogs + feeds + newsgroups are all basically feeds for me, and I’m currently subscribed to over 200. My “Mozilla” folder contains:

• Above the Fold
• Foxkeh’s Blog
• Metrics Blog
• Mozilla Dot Org
• Mozilla Foundation Futures
• Mozilla Links
• Planet Mozilla
• QMO – quality.mozilla.org
• The irc.mozilla.org QDB
• The Mozilla Blog
• Web Tech Blog
• …and a handful of other personal blogs by Mozillians

Yes, I know it contains duplicates, I do that on purpose.

5. Lastly, name a guilty pleasure in your feedreader.
Confessions of a Pioneer Woman. She’s insanely awesome.

Bonus question: What do you use to read feeds?
Google reader, although I’d kill for something that would help me organize things better and deal gracefully with significantly more volume. I have to keep my feeds down to around 200, which is really a pain in the butt, since I’d like to follow hundreds (thousands?) more.

Taggees!

• Johnath Nightingale
• Gavin Sharp
• Mike Shaver
• Ben Hearsum

http://twitter.com/planetmozilla

Follow along @planetmozilla.

I’ve added the archives to the about:mozilla weblog, on their very own Newsletters archives page. The blog itself hasn’t been in use for quite some time, but I’m re-evaluating that now and there will likely be activity there again soon.