Internet

Mozilla is currently deep in the heart of its celebration over officially setting a new Guinness World Record for the largest number of software downloads (8,002,530!) in 24 hours for its Firefox 3 browser. But the company isn't cheering alone - its enjoying this victory with the community it rightfully credits for helping it to succeed.

Mozilla's marketing strategy has historically been word-of-mouth engagement, a method that very creatively began with its 2004 Firefox 1.0 launch. As more social networking venues have opened up and expanded to businesses, Mozilla has adapted to putting up appropriate channels and resources.

"Since Firefox is all about the online experience it's a natural fit for folks who are open to social networking," said Paul Kim, vice president of marketing for Mozilla. "We announced Download Day with a very concerted plan to leverage multiple social networks and to seed content on those networks that would drive traffic to the download site."

Last November, Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's former campaign strategist, derisively said that Barack Obama's supporters "look like Facebook."

Chris Hughes takes that as a compliment. Hughes, 24, was one of four founders of Facebook. In early 2007, he left the company to work in Chicago on Obama's new-media campaign. Leaving behind his company at such a critical time would appear to require some cognitive dissonance: political campaigns, after all, are built on handshakes and persuasion, not computer servers, and Hughes has watched, sometimes ruefully, as Facebook has marketed new products that he helped develop.

"It was overwhelming for the first two months," he recalled. "It took a while to get my bearings."

But in fact, working on the Obama campaign may have moved Hughes closer to the center of the social networking phenomenon, not farther away.

The Obama campaign's new-media strategy, inspired by popular social networks like MySpace and Facebook, has revolutionized the use of the Web as a political tool, helping the candidate raise more than two million donations of less than $200 each and swiftly mobilize hundreds of thousands of supporters.

One of the most astonishing results in a market so new is that, overall, 52% of respondents who had watched TV or video online said they would be interested in watching TV and movies on their laptops "on a regular basis." This points to a genuine boom in online viewing of prime content, which should strengthen the commitment of content owners and Internet players to develop workable standards and business models.

The ICT arena is characterized by the strategic control exercised by powerful corporations and nations - monopolies built upon the intellectual property regime, increasing surveillance of the Interned and an undermining of its democratic substance, and exploitation of the powerless by capitalist imperialism, sexism and racism.  Within the ICT arena women have relatively little ownership of and influence on the decision-making processes being underrepresented in the private sector and government bodies which control this arena.

Slowly, but effectively, the Internet is empowering women in Africa to follow events as they have never witnessed before. The latest case in point is the women in Somalia who have been following their country's peace talks in neighbouring Kenya via Internet usage.