213763 - Create a Mozilla newsletter

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Marketing :: General, task)

Description

[Percy Cabello]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.5a) Gecko/20030701 Mozilla Firebird/0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.5a) Gecko/20030701 Mozilla Firebird/0.6

To enhance users awareness of what's going on the Mozilla world, a weekly
newsletter should be available. These topics may be regular:

- news of the week
- an abstract of the most recent mozilla.org staff meeting minutes
- an abstract of the independent status report
- top thread of the week in the Mozillazine forums
- survey of the week (hosted by mozillazine) and previous week results.
- news on new Mozilla products such as merchandise and CD releases

- ads in exchange for other projects' newsletters, may be also a source of
revenue if open to private advertisers.

- accustomed contact information, disclaimer, unsubscribe info, etc.

For at least these  topics, a staff would be required: 
- a marketing advisor, who notifies on new products and upcoming events and so.
- a mozillazine moderator perhaps, who may be able to notice a hot thread
- translators, ready to quickly translate the final english version in no more
than 24 hours, as an acceptable delay between editions
- a contact in mozillazine, who will let him know the survey of the week to be
launched at the same time as the newsletter delivery
- an editor, who will:
  * check the weekly meeting minutes release and independent status report, and
be able to contact the poster of each for clarification on any doubt, and 
  * make a fast verification of transalations thourgh some automated translation
engine like google's.
  * send the newsletters
  * pick the news of the week

format: HTML/text?
name: ?
frequency: ?
day of the month/week?
edition close?





Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[David Boswell]

this sounds like a great idea and i'll be happy to help.  right now i do the
status reports in a very unscheduled way, but i can post them more regularly if
there is a newsletter schedule to follow.

a newsletter was also something we had thought of doing on mozdev but ended up
deciding not to because of a lack of resources.  if several different people are
contributing to different parts of a newsletter though it should be feasible to
put something together regularly.

i'm not sure if there's much that can be reused from the little we did, but you
can check it out at

http://mozdev.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=2799

and

http://mozdev.org/wir.html

Comment 2

[Daniel Wang]

we already have status update. What we need is making it much more visible
(takes half a year to discover it :-( )

Comment 3

[Percy Cabello]

A call for tips and threads of the week has been posted to MozillaZine Forums

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=131364#131364

Post follows:

As you may know, a Mozilla newsletter is currently in the works, under the name
of Mozilla Links. http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213763

There will be a section called Hot Thread of the Week. The thread is refered to
one running in MozillaZine forums, which because of relevance for consumer users
or developers, good ideas or suggestions, good tips and similar, should be
recommended to Mozilla links readers. Maybe a moderator would be best suited,
but for sure there are heavy posters who will enjoy identifying a hot thread and
share it with others.

There is also a section for Tip of the Week. So everybody is encouraged to post
their tips either for consumer users (nothing on editing .js, or abut:config),
but mainly reminders or less known features or options, as well as PoweTips for
power users (feel free to mention .js, about:config, and all else) Suggestions
to manage bookmarks for example, moving a profile and so on. Please try to be
brief and clear.

Post your tips and powertips to the same bug, mentioning which kind of tip it
is, for which Mozilla product, version (keep it to releases not builds) and if
specific for a particular platform. Try to keep it to less than 80 words. Also
mention if you want your name and/or email to be included. No names or emails
will be included by default. 


Your tips are welcome. Once gain thanks!

Comment 4

[Daniel Wang]

Tip of the Day: Google Keyword

You can use the Bookmark Keyword feature to create a shortcut to your
favorite search engine, for example, type "g mp3" in the Location
Bar to Google for mp3. To do this, first open the Bookmark Manager
(Ctrl+B). In the Bookmark Manager, make a new bookmark
(File > New > Bookmark). Set the Location to
"http://www.google.com/search?q=%s" and the Keyword to "g". Save the
bookmark, and now you can Google your way with the "g" keyword :-)

To use another site, do a dummy search for "MYSEARCH". Then copy the
address in the Location Bar and paste it to the New Bookmark dialog.
Replace the word "MYSEARCH" with "%s". Then set your keyword and you are
done!

Comment 5

[Daniel Wang]

PowerTip of the Day

Ever wonder what tab you are on? In the default classic theme, the tab bar can
be confusing because the active and non-active tabs look alike. You can make
sense of it by making title on the active tab bold. To do this, open a text
editor and type in the following:

  tab[selected="true"] { font-weight: bold;}
  tab { font-weight: normal; }

Save the file as userChrome.css in the chrome/ directory in your profile. (if
you don't know where, search your disk for a file called
"userChrome-example.css", and put userChrome.css in the same place as that
file.) Restart Mozilla for the setting to take effect.

-

The 1st tip is ~110 words and 2nd tip is ~100 words. Can you up the max word
count? (and yes, you can publish my name)

Comment 6

[Alex Bishop]

> we already have status update. What we need is making it much more visible
> (takes half a year to discover it :-( )

The status update is more technical though. I think this newsletter is supposed
to have a wider appeal.

Comment 7

[Percy Cabello]

We need to somehow find a way to get this technical advances and concerns that
are normally reported in the status update, to be translated to improvements for
end users and for developers who are or are plannin to build over mozilla
platform, or count on mozilla products; as well as keeping informed the mozilla
more technical skill commmunity. Somehow it should balance all three audiences.

Comment 8

[Percy Cabello]

We need to somehow find a way to get this technical advances and concerns that
are normally reported in the status update, to be translated to improvements for
end users and for developers who are or are plannin to build over mozilla
platform, or count on mozilla products; as well as keeping informed the mozilla
more technical skill commmunity. Somehow it should balance all three audiences.

Comment 9

[Percy Cabello]

Tips and Powertips moved to bug 214470

Thanks and keep the posts coming.

Comment 10

[Daniel Wang]

To whom will be the newsletter be distributed to? I'm wary about pushing info on
non-stable branch builds to end users. I think the newsletter should make it
clear what is for the average users and what is for the hardcore fan. In
particular, the daily tip (not daily powertip) should only cover info on Mozilla
1.0.x and Mozilla 1.4.

Percy, do you have a draft showing what the newsletter will look like?

Comment 11

[Percy Cabello]

Attachment: Mozilla newsletter draft

A draft of the newsletter, most relevant for structure, presentation and
contact info.

Comment 12

[Percy Cabello]

The newsletter audience is any user of any Mozilla product. However the
newsletter will have sections that are specific for different type of users.
Probably the status update will be more relevant for developers and tech savvy
and not end users. in th other side, tips and news will be more oriented to end
users non-tech savvy, however everybody will have the chance to have an idea of
what's going in general. 

As for the tips, they have been requested for releases and not builds. I may
need to clarify, but mostly tips are targeted to Mozilla suite and powertips to
in the works releases: firebird, thunderbird, camino, sunbird, alphas and betas.

Comment 13

[Brian King [:kinger]]

Draft looks good. Just a few points:

- What's the difference between project of the week and featured extension? Is
there not some overlap here?

- At the end of section 3, link should be http://bugxula.mozdev.org/ and not
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/

Comment 14

[Percy Cabello]

As far as I know not all the projects in mozdev are related to extensions but
documentations or localization (in fact I have a project on hold there for a
spanish guide because of the newsletter). So maybe many times the project of the
week will refer to an extension but I'd expect not always. Or is there some
other criteria for selecting project of the week (like being an extension).
Please David or Brian clarify on this.

Comment 15

[Brian King [:kinger]]

Yes, you are right ... many projects are not extensions, but stand-alone apps,
documentation projects, etc. I can see the differences, yet sometimes there will
be similarities when an extension if chosen.

The initial criteria we use for project of the week are:
- has to be an active project
- has to have a usable release version
- have to have the consent of the project owner

FYI, the mozdev project categories are listed here:
http://www.mozdev.org/categories/index.html

Comment 16

[Straxus]

Attachment: Techie Newsgroup Etiquette article

This is a sanitization of an article that I had posted on
netscape.public.mozilla.(general?) a few days ago. It deals with how to
interpret the response and conversation style of techies on a newsgroup. Daniel
Wang had requested that I clean it up and referred to this bug, so I'm posting
it as an attachment.

Comment 17

[Percy Cabello]

Based on the criteria you mention for Project of the Week I find it is very
similar to what is wanted for the Extension of the Week: a mature and authorized
release. So maybe it would be better to has as a requisite for the Extension of
the week with previous Projects of the Week. This way we could promote two
extensions.

Another thought is that not all the extensions and development for Mozilla
addons is done in mozdev but sourceforge and independent sites. Any idea on how
to contact them? Also we can prepare here a list of well known extensions as a
start for the first issues:
- Tab browsing extensions
- Mouse gestures

Comment 18

[Percy Cabello]

Hi Straxus. Could you please change your attachment format to HTML? Thanks!!

Comment 19

[Martin Alderson]

Sounds like a great idea, however I think to engource interactivity with the
newsletter, we should have either (or, IMO, both) a QA (where users ask
questions about mozilla - technical, support, 'roadmap' type ones etc and get a
response from a senior moz. person. one 'question/answer' per week) and also a
letters page where users could send in a letter on a moz-related subject of
there choosing.

This will have 2 effects:

1) Overall activity within the newsletter will increase, and we may get some
people who were previously just users alone becoming more intrested in the
project and contributing in some way.
2) Show that the devs care about the end-users.

Also, I'm sick of newsletters which just are just stuff you can find out by
visting the mozilla website, which I do every day at least. Something extra
would be nice.

Comment 20

[Percy Cabello]

Regarding this concern, although the newsletter is intended for all audiences,
its main target are consumer users. I really don't think a user like you, me or
other people heavily interested at this point in Mozilla, and frequently
visiting (daily) MozillaZine, mozillanews, mozilla.org and browsing the web for
mozilla news, will be surprised frequently, because it is mainly a NEWSletter
with extras like th tips, extensions, status and so on. However it will serve
two other purposes in my opinion:
- to know what end users are seeing of the Mozilla world
- as a point for people who may want to share some knowledge in some specific
topic of the Mozilla world, as contributions for featured articles
- hopefully extended coverage in news published by other sources. Mozilla is
just not that big to be able to provide too many sources with exclusive news. In
 general, no product is capable of doing that.

I have just wrote the suggestion of the QA section. It's a different approach to
what the Hot Thread of the Week is intended to provide. We'll see!

Comment 21

[Percy Cabello]

Attachment: Mozilla Links (Beta)

This version was sumbitted today to the Mozilla Marketing mailing list. Your
comments are welcome here as well.

Comment 22

[Daniel Wang]

-> Percy

Comment 23

[Daniel Wang]

MozillaZine announced this will go live on Tuesday

Comment 24

[chris hofmann]

noticed this question popping up in several places, due to recent concern over
security and viruses.... might be good fodder for the next newsletter

I would like to know if my Norton Antivirus is scanning all my emails. It is
enabled and was doing this to all my Outlook Express incoming emails.
Thanks,
Mary Feathergill
Badger Foundry Company
[e-mail]

asa found a few questions and answers like this on the newsgroup

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&safe=off&q=norton+mozilla+mail&sa=N&tab=wg
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=norton+mozilla+mail&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&selm=bg40iq0kk%40enews1.newsguy.com&rnum=1
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=norton+mozilla+mail&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&selm=Xns92D0F0626C9ACBAHhumbug%40204.29.187.156&rnum=4

Security is one of the cornerstones of  the advantages that enterprises,
organizations, and consumers can gain by using mozilla technologg, and any
chance we get to promote this advantage we should do so... 

Comment 25

[bart decrem, not checking bugmail]

done - thanks to Percy.  See newsletter.mozdev.org.

Comment 26

[Daniel Wang]

v