Pop technology: Colbert show gave Firefox 3 download rate a solid boost
Firefox 3 already broke a Guiness world record when it launched last month and was downloaded more than eight million times in the first 24 hours. Now, in a demonstration of the increasingly common intersections between web technology and pop culture, Firefox parent company Mozilla has some stats up that precisely calculated the impact of a mention it received on the popular Colbert Report TV show. Mozilla tracked the minute-by-minute download rate to try to detect the correlation between it and the Colbert mention. When show host Stephen Colbert, in his comedically self-promoting way, said “Firefox 3 just got the Colbert bump,” the Firefox 3 download rate did indeed get the bump. See graph, below. You can watch the mention, above.
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About the Author, Eric Eldon
Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.