AN ROI for open source

Amazing... if you can, grab a copy of today's New York Times and turn to the spread on pages A25 & A26. You'll see a cool ad placed by the folks behind Mozilla's open-source Firefox browser and paid for by 10,000 adopters of Firefox (aka SFX, "Support Firefox"). You can download the ad as a PDF or order it as a limited-edition print. And the connection with blogging is...

Twofold. 1.) Blogs were largely responsible for spreading the word about this fundraising effort. Ten thousand Mozilla fans rallied in ten days to raise the tens of thousands of dollars it costs to buy a two-page ad in the Times. You'll need a magnifying glass to read their names, all of which appear in the ad. 2.) The Firefox browser is RSS-enabled. Meaning it knows if a site you browse to offers an RSS feed. Very cool...

So... if you're wondering what the ROI of blogging is, calculate the worth of word-of-mouth that buys you international exposure. Amazing, huh?! More about Firefox and the sfx (spread Firefox) movement here.