Sad false start for Firefox viral marketing campaign

I almost laughed my ass off after this!!! A marketing campaign labeled Fight Against Boredom based on a viral video apparently featuring actors playing stereotypes and real Firefox users. This seems to be the video filmed a few weeks ago and Mozilla called fans to participate on.

The video follows the aid video format (think We are the world): lots of people alternating on a microphone in a recording studio, shows several funny real facts like Firefox users are 14% less likely to have sleep disorders or 16% less likely to have fungal infections than Internet Explorer users. The numbers are based on recent Nielsen surveys according to Mozilla Marketing VP, Paul Kim.

At the end, the video prompts to visit fightagainstboredom.org which wasn’t supposed to go live yet but due to an error in the content development process it was accessible today, and technology news site, TechCrunch reported that among other contents some not so funny statistics were published like “38% less likely to live with others suffering from breast cancer.” and “24% less likely to live with others suffering from heart disease”.

Reactions didn’t take long labeling the mishap as offensive and of very bad taste at the very minimum.

In a comment to the post and a blog post later, Paul Kim apologized: “I want to sincerely apologize for this oversight. We hadn’t reviewed the stats before they were accidentally published and some of them are clearly in poor taste and humor. This does not reflect the views of Mozilla and we are working to fix this immediately.”

As of this writing, fightagainstboredom.org is not accessible and requires user authentication.

As for the video, which features Tay Zonday (or a look/voice alike), of Chocolate Rain (a viral video) fame, it has driven a broad range of reactions from “brilliant” to “I love Firefox, but this video sucked on a whole new level”and “OK, this has actually made me switch to IE for the time being. Anyone else embarrassed to use Firefox now ?”

I think a video can become viral because of being too beautiful or too funny not to pass along and I don’t see Rise Up falling on any of those categories. If the unfortunate mishap turns to ruin the viral marketing campaign I am not sure if there’d be much to be sorry about.

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ABC launches viral marketing campaign for Lost

Check out the billboard in Portland, Oregon for the new season of Lost. A friend of mine, Chris, shot this photo recently.

As
you can see, it's a billboard advertising Oceanic Air, which is the
fictional airline in the series. The billboard includes the website FlyOceanicAir.
Of course, I checked out the website and it is for Oceanic, but it
appears to have been hijacked by a possible new character for the next
season. There's a video message from a guy named 'Sam' who says he is
looking for Sonya, a flight attendant who he also calls his "partner".

Sam's video has flashes of another website, Find815,
which is Sam's personal effort to keep searching for flight 815, the
Oceanic flight which crash landed on the island and started this whole
fiasco. That website has a little challenge for fans-- to find the
differences in two pictures of Sonya. It's pretty obvious, but I'll let
you check it out without spoiling things.

While I thoroughly
enjoy wacky marketing like this, I imagine that a lot of drivers in
Portland fully believe there's a new airline that wants them to fly to
Seoul, South Korea.

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Wiki-inspired "transparent" search-engine

Wikia Search is a new, wiki-inspired search-engine project that attempts to create a transparent set of ranking algorithms that fight spam and promote good stuff to the top. This is in contrast to Google, Yahoo, and other search engines, where the ranking algorithms are treated as trade secrets and high-risk tactics that have to be guarded from spammers.

The idea of a ranking algorithm is that it produces "good results" -- returns the best, most relevant results based on the user's search terms. We have a notion that the traditional search engine algorithm is "neutral" -- that it lacks an editorial bias and simply works to fulfill some mathematical destiny, embodying some Platonic ideal of "relevance." Compare this to an "inorganic" paid search result of the sort that Altavista used to sell.

But ranking algorithms are editorial: they embody the biases, hopes, beliefs and hypotheses of the programmers who write and design them. What's more, a tiny handful of search engines effectively control the prominence and viability of the majority of the information in the world.

And those search engines use secret ranking systems to systematically and secretly block enormous swaths of information on the grounds that it is spam, malware, or using deceptive "optimization" techniques. The list of block-ees is never published, nor are the criteria for blocking. This is done in the name of security, on the grounds that spammers and malware hackers are slowed down by the secrecy.

But "security through obscurity" is widely discredited in information security circles. Obscurity stops dumb attackers from getting through, but it lets the smart attackers clobber you because the smart defenders can't see how your system works and point out its flaws.

Seen in this light, it's positively bizarre: a few companies' secret editorial criteria are used to control what information we see, and those companies defend their secrecy in the name of security-through-obscurity? Yikes!

source: www.boingboing.net

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