The Mozilla evangelist community is on a mission to build a list of 2,000 web sites that have written favorably about the Firefox Web browser and are likely to add a button if contacted (as I have already done). Excerpts from Blake Ross' blog...
Not even at 1.0 yet, the Firefox already enjoys inbound links to its product page from a staggering 74,000 websites. This is 20,000 more than link to Opera, 5,000 more than link to Netscape, 15,000 more than link to Microsoft's IE page and 12,000 more than link to Apple. This is phenomenal!
We're still not satisfied :-). Microsoft is readying XP SP2 as we speak, which promises to undercut some of our best selling points. They're also rebuilding the IE team. We can't get lazy just because we lead the pack in referrers; we need to be so far ahead that the others are just a blip on the radar.
Doing that will require us to be a little more aggressive in urging people to help us spread the word. Last month, Asa and I conducted an experiment in which we directly contacted dozens of bloggers who raved about Firefox and informed them about our buttons program. We didn't mass-mail them all a generic message; Asa regularly reads through all the bloggers that write about Firefox, and we sent genuine, personal e-mails to each author. The results were astounding. Nearly 90% of the dozens of sites we contacted responded warmly and added a button to their web sites. Some expressed surprise that we even offered buttons. (We will be working to expand the buttons program and make it more visible in the future.) Others just said they needed that push to add one. Many expressed appreciation that the people busy building the product were taking the time to personally contact them.
Encouraged by the overwhelmingly positive response, we are moving forward and turning this temporary experiment into a full-time, ongoing project. We would like your help building a list of sites to contact about adding a button; Asa and I will contact them personally in the coming weeks. Web apps programmer Andrew Cave has built us a fantastic tool for managing the list.
