thoughts on mozilla

Designed through the Mozilla Creative Collective, the 2010 Mozilla t-shirt is now available and shipping, as announced by Chelsea Novak, a fundraiser for the Mozilla Foundation.

Unlike previous shirts which could be purchased from the Mozilla store, the 2010 shirt requires a donation of $75 or more to the Mozilla Foundation’s “Open Web Fund.” Of course, the original Mozilla store has been offline for quite a while after serious privacy and security concerns were raised. But most users can still order t-shirts and other swag from the international store and also from the community store. Given that the t-shirt was designed by a community member, one would think it’d be available on the community store.

Mozilla continues to call this the “2010″ shirt, implying that they’ll release a new shirt next year and possibly implying that they only intend to release one new shirt this year. Meanwhile, the lovable Dino continues to get fatter.

Earlier tonight, a tiny bit early, the Firefox Cup marketing campaign launched.

The site features a list of countries who qualified for the World Cup tournament and Personas for each of them. Firefox users will compete against one another by using the Persona of the country they support.

Currently, Argentina tops the list, with Brazil not far behind and gaining fast. Looking at the bottom of the list, I can’t help but feel sorry for North Korea, who will almost certainly rank last due to their heavily filtered internet.

Update: And here’s the official Mozilla announcement.

Announced at the weekly update meeting this week was the “Firefox Cup,” a marketing engagement campaign that attempts to keep users connected to the World Cup using Firefox, expose more users to Personas, and increase the overall usage of Personas.

The campaign is expected to launch on June 11 (at firefoxcup.com) and will pit users against other users by way of Personas. The country with the most users of their World Cup Persona will be declared the winner.

This campaign might remind you of the Joga Companion, a marketing campaign from 2006 World Cup. That campaign was a joint venture between Mozilla, Nike, and Google. However, this time around, with more resources and money, Mozilla has opted to just create personas, instead of a full-fledged add-on.

More information on the campaign can be found on the Mozilla wiki.