Tag: campaign

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Drawing of a silver person standing in the desert in front of a flying saucer.I really enjoyed the original run (Saucer Country) at Vertigo and the second run at IDW (Saucer State)…that ended on a cliffhanger, and I’m really looking forward to being able to read the conclusion!

Saucer Country is a dark thriller that blends UFO lore and alien abduction with political intrigue, all set in the hauntingly beautiful Southwest.

The comics by Paul Cornell & Ryan Kelly follow a presidential campaign whose candidate believes she has been abducted by aliens, what that means to her and the country, and weaves through every aspect of UFO conspiracy mythology you can think of.

The first volume ran from 2012-2013, and the second volume picked up in 2017…and it was really weird to see how prescient the first run had been, as well as how the 2016 election season influenced the second part.

Finally in 2022 they ran a crowdfunding campaign at Zoop (launching on election day, of course!) to fund the concluding chapters and a collected edition.

And now: It’s done! It’s printed! It’s shipped! I got my copy in the mail today! (And it’s been long enough that I’m going to want to start at the beginning anyway.)

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Microsoft has jumped on the ditch-IE6 bandwagon with IE6Countdown.com, following in the footsteps of such campaigns as Browse Happy, End 6, and Save the Developers.

Of course, since it’s a Microsoft-sponsored campaign, it’s only promoting upgrades, rather than promoting an upgrade-or-switch message.

Static HTML points out why you might want to put your effort into some other campaign instead. Because IE6 Countdown is only an upgrade campaign, and IE6 users are all on Windows XP or below (Vista ships with IE7), they can only ever upgrade as far as IE8. Given the huge gap between IE8 and IE9 in terms of standards support, HTML5, CSS3, and so forth, IE8 will soon become the new millstone around the web’s neck.

So instead of plugging IE, consider plugging your own favorite browser, be it Firefox, Chrome or Opera. Or perhaps plug another switch campaign. After all, there are quite a few alternative web browsers out there!

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Roomba Path (photo by SignalTheorist)

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I haven’t written much about BlogExplosion in a long time.  I participated a lot for a few months, then kind of left it alone for a while, until I came back to it last year when I launched Speed Force.

Sadly, in the last few months its owners seem to have abandoned the site to let it run on autopilot. Most of it is automated, but there are features that require administration: approving new blogs and banners, moderating the forums, etc. The few volunteers with the ability to approve submissions are swamped, the main page promotes features that no longer exist, and the forums are overrun with spam.

In the past two months the community has attempted to take back the forums by out-posting the spammers, and it seems to be helping, but it’s not enough. The next step is a letter-writing campaign to convince BlogExplosion’s owners to at least delegate some authority to community volunteers who are willing to put in the effort to take care of the site.

Rather than send the form letter, I decided to write my own, and sent the following this morning:

Continue reading →

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Rather than looking at campaigns for specific browsers, I’m looking at a class of campaigns that are either promoting a group of browsers, or advocating against the current dominant player: Internet Explorer.

Browse Happy — the classic.

  • Goal: Move users away from Internet Explorer.
  • Target Audience: IE users.
  • Promotes: Firefox.  Also Safari, Opera, and… um… Mozilla.  Hmm, someone needs to update that.
  • Pitch: IE is dangerous.
  • Method: Banners

Alternative Browser Alliance

  • Goal: Keep multiple standards-compliant browsers viable.
  • Target Audience: All users
  • Promotes: Opera, Firefox, Safari.  Also Flock, SeaMonkey, K-Meleon, Camino,etc.
  • Pitch: Competition is good for everyone.  See what’s out there.
  • Method: Banners

End 6! (end6.org)

  • Goal: Move people off of IE6
  • Target Audience: IE6 users
  • Promotes: Firefox, Opera, Safari, Flock, IE7
  • Pitch: IE6 is outdated, buggy, and unsafe.  Use something modern instead.
  • Method: Overlay for IE6 visitors

Save the Developers (savethedevelopers.org)

  • Goal: Move people off of IE6
  • Target Audience: IE6 users
  • Promotes: IE7, Firefox, Safari, Opera
  • Pitch: Coding for IE6 is a pain.  Stop putting us through that.
  • Method: Animated drop-down at top of page for IE6 visitors

(Yeah, I’m catching up on old draft posts.)