[ Update: There's a good note on ajaxian, the most important of which is the last paragraph.  Have a look. ]

Everyone agrees that the open web is becoming more important in our shared human experience.  Our applications, conversations and relationships are moving online and Mozilla finds itself more and more at the heart of defining both the underlying technology and the end-user experience of users of the web.  It’s an important role to have, and it’s one of the reasons why operating as a non-profit with a full understanding of our mission and impact are important.

Taking the long view, the open web as a technology platform isn’t something that we see in human history very often.  The printing press let you replicate knowledge cheaply and easily.  Television and radio lowered the cost of distribution of media.  The web took away the centralization of big media and anyone can produce and distribute.  The costs of replication, distribution and reaction have dropped to near zero.

I personally believe that this is because of the technology choices that were made in the early days of the evolution of the web.  Human-readable formats for documents, simple programs delivered as source code and the ability for anyone to be able to post and create.  There were no ivory towers or professional developers in those early days so the act of creation had to be simple.  Web technology required you to be technical-minded, but didn’t require huge amounts of training to get started.  Mixed with the end-to-end principle of the Internet and the fact that just about anyone could set up a server or a client meant that the web didn’t grow with the backing of huge players, but became a huge shared collection based on the small efforts of thousands of individuals.

The result of that has been an explosion of creativity and investment from single individuals all the way up to the largest companies.  Anyone can have an impact and anyone can affect the technology direction of the web.  Because anyone can build tools without permission that speak the lingua franca of the web, you can find tools to do just about anything.  It’s a truly vibrant marketplace.

There’s one exception to this: video on the web.  Although videos are available on the web via sites like youtube, they don’t share the same democratized characteristics that have made the web vibrant and distributed.  And it shows.  That centralization has created some interesting problems that have symptoms like censorship via abuse of the DMCA and an overly-concentrated audience on a few sites that have the resources and technology to host video.  I believe that problems like the ones we see with youtube are a symptom of the larger problem of the lack of decentralization and competition in video technology – very different than where the rest of the web is today.

In my mind there are two things that help drive that kind of decentralization:

• You should be able to easily understand how something moves from a computer-readable format to something that is presented to a user.  For example, turning HTML into a document, turning a JPEG file into a picture on the screen or using HTTP to download a file.
• You must be able to implement and deliver that technology without requiring anyone’s permission or license.  In reality this means that it should be available on a royalty-free basis and without encumbered documentation.

In the video world, there are some formats that fit the first quality:  Some formats are documented, understood and even widely deployed.  But more often than not they are subject to to per-unit royalties, large up-front fees and creating content in those formats (the encoders) are often so expensive as to be prohibitive to all but only the deepest-pocketed corporations or well-funded startups.  And there are very few video formats that meet the second.  This is not the kind of decentralization that made the web thrive.  It is quite the opposite.

So now we get to the Mozilla part of this story: what we’re doing about this.

• In Firefox 3.1 we’re including support for the OGG container format with the Theora video and Vorbis audio codecs for the <video> element.  They represent one of the few combinations of formats that fits both the criteria above.  They aren’t perfect formats, but they are certainly good enough for how video is used on the web today.  And they are improving with time.
• We’re also supporting the development of open video with a grant of $100,000 (USD) that will be administered by the Wikimedia Foundation to develop and support Theora.  You should expect to see some really great stuff coming out of that funding.  That work will make its way back into Firefox as well.
• The other thing we’re able to do is to make video a first class citizen on the web.  This means we can do things with video and let it interact with other types of content (SVG, Canvas, HTML) in ways that haven’t been possible to date.  We hope that by releasing video from the plugin prison and letting it play nice with others we’ll be able to open up a new wave of creativity around video.  But more on that in another post.

We don’t expect that by doing this we’ll change things overnight.  Far from it – changes like this take time.  But we can certainly do our part to at least make it possible for these things to develop.  We want to see a market for video like we’ve seen for the web.  And this is our put to get that process started.

Evangelism Work Week Kickoff

This week the Evangelism team are all in Mountain View to connect and plan for 2009.  A crazy bunch of people who care about a lot of different things – add-ons, documentation, community development and the open web.

One of the more important things we’ll be doing this week is working on making it easier for people to get involved with the evangelism team.  I’ll post more at the end of the week, but you can also watch the Evangelism page in the wiki – we’ll start putting updates there.

It's Asa on the tee vee. He's talkin' into the Internets.

Asa Dotzler has been trying to get live streaming working with our new native video support that’s coming with Firefox 3.1.  That is, video that is taken by a camera, encoded and pushed directly out to a web server instead of stored as a file so you can watch an event in real time.  The screenshot above is the first time – that I know of – where anyone has gotten this working in the browser without some kind of plug-in involved.  (And it’s free software, end-to-end, which is also nice.)

We managed to get the lag down to 2-3 seconds at one point.  We can probably get it even lower.  But it’s a fantastic start.

Asa isn’t the most technical guy, but he managed to get it working by mostly following the instructions on this page.  And it mostly works out of the box.  There are some bugs to fix on our end, and encoding theora without dedicated hardware is kind of painful, but it’s great to see the possibilities open up when we’ve got dedicated video support directly in the browser.

Firefox final releases.

These are the builds that show up on the main page on mozilla.com.  The current build is Firefox 3.0.5 and users who previously have downloaded and installed Firefox 3 are automatically updated to builds as we release them.  They are generally done on a 6 week schedule, or as security or bug fixes require.

Firefox 3.1 does not have a final release yet and as such it’s not on this page yet.

Firefox beta builds.

There is a link on mozilla.com to download released betas.  If you’ve downloaded and installed one of these betas you will also be offered betas as we release them.  Once we move from beta to release candidate, you will be offered upgrades to the release candidates and eventually to Firefox 3.1 final when it’s released.

Firefox beta nightly builds.

As of the writing of this entry, Firefox 3.1 development has branched and our beta, release candidate and 3.1 final work is being done on a separate branch.  We generate builds every day for people to test beta functionality.  You can find the built nightlies on our download server in the latest-1.9.1 directory.  (In addition, have a look at our mozilla QA project (QMO) for information about how to get involved!)  If you’re following this set of builds you will get the opportunity to update one or more times a day with new builds.  As of Beta 2, these builds are pretty stable and these are what I’m currently running for all my day to day work.  You can tell these are the beta builds because they are named “Shiretoko.”

Firefox trunk nightly builds.

This is the rawest of the raw (although still not too bad!)  This will eventually become Firefox 3.2 or Firefox 4 or whatever we end up calling it.  Fixes that are set to land in the Firefox 3.1 branch land here first, so it’s a place to test out fixes before they make it to the beta channel.  You can find these builds in our latest-trunk directory.  You will likely see more instability and bugs here.  Updates are done daily, or sometimes more than once a day.  If you’re running these you definitely want to be involved in our QMO effort.  You can tell these are trunk builds since they are named “Minefield.”

Hope this helps – enjoy!

These things always have rules.  Here they are.

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

And here’s my list.

1. I’ve owned 14 cars in my short life.  This will be chronicled in a later post for your reading pleasure.  And it’s a pretty good list – mostly late 70s vintage Toyotas purchased in my youth for far less than 300 United States Dollars (not adjusted for inflation.)  Some great stories here – trust me.

2. I like monkeys.  OK, you probably know this about me.  But it’s true.

3. I have a brother that plays drums in a band.  My brother taught himself to play the drums in a few months by sitting in his attic for 6 hours a day every day.  You can hear his stuff with his band, Thousands of One.  They are based out of Ithaca, NY.  (Note: if you’re in Boston they tend to play there at Matt Murphy’s or at the Middle East.  Their live stuff is pretty good.  Drop by some time.)

4.  I’ve was charged with a real honest-to-god Misdemeanor when I was 16 or 17.  The craziest charge ever: “Allowing Clinging to the Motor Vehicle.”  Turns out it’s a pretty serious crime in many states.  Did some community service and the charges were dropped.  (Did my friends, who climbed onto my moving car without my permission and didn’t get off when I asked have to stand before a judge like an idiot and do community service?  No.  I still need to send them bills for that time, now that I’m thinking about it.  With interest.)

5. I don’t drink.  Not for religious reasons or anything, just because it’s bad for me and I have a highly addictive personality.  As I tell people “I like having a job and being married and stuff.  Seems like a good trade-off.”  Also, favorite drink is the shirley temple.  With extra cherries.  That’s a bonus fact for those of you who have paid attention thus far.

6. I have a pilot’s license.  Yep, the US federal government thinks that I’m competent to operate aircraft.  Or at least very small ones.  With one engine.  I also have an instrument rating, which means I can operate an aircraft as if it were a video game that can actually kill you.  Haven’t flown in a couple of years because it’s pretty expensive to do so and I have other priorities.  But it’s still something that’s nice to have and was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life.

7. I enjoy things that other people think are crap.  Bad movies, sitcoms, pop music, taco bell, your mom’s cooking.  These things have a place along with the so-called good stuff.  Much like Mike Myers I live without a filter.  There’s room for both the brilliant and the basics.

And that’s about it.

And my victims:

1. Jonathan Blandford – he never posts enough anyway.  In fact, I can’t even find his weblog.

2. Asa Dotzler – who has one of the most interesting histories of anyone I know.

3. Joe Drew – he looks like the kind of guy who is up for this kind of thing.  Also, \o/.

4. Jesse Keating – he has tattoos.

5. Nat Friedman – the source of all kinds of crazy stories.

6. Greg DeKoenigsberg – who probably won’t, but might post seven angry things about him you didn’t know.

7. Ivan Kirigin – whom I don’t know personally but he has that awesome icon on twitter so I pick him.