Mitchell Baker has written before that she believes there is a need to make basic, aggregate, anonymized information about Internet usage more widely available. “If everything that is known about the basic usage of the Internet is closed and proprietary then the Internet as an open platform will suffer.” Mitchell has now posted some examples of what she means by “usage data”, most of which we’re quite accustomed to seeing in aggregated, anonymized forms. These include: a site’s bandwidth usage, site “traffic” in a day or month, and software download numbers. “These examples are clearly very general. I use them precisely for this reason — to demonstrate that we already understand the usefulness of this type of data and that it can be presented in an aggregate, anonymous form. There are other forms of aggregate, anonymous data that can be equally useful in understanding how the Internet is being used and ultimately, understanding what the Internet really is.” To read Mitchell’s full post, visit her weblog.

Part of the Firefox 3 launch included a t-shirt contest in which we “open sourced” the design process to create the official Firefox 3 t-shirt. Not only did we get a fantastic winning shirt, we also received a huge number of other great designs. There’s been a growing demand to make more of these community designs available for purchase, so for the past few months the Marketing team has been sorting out the legal and logistical challenges to make this possible. Tara Shahain has recently announced the good news: “[W]e’ve partnered with Zazzle.com to create the ‘Mozilla Community Store’ – a sidekick to the original Mozilla Store which will serve as a new and open channel for community generated products. The Community Store isn’t quite finished yet, but I hope to have it ready in the next month or so. Make sure to start thinking of your designs! Once it launches, we’ll have plenty of details to help guide you through the entire process. Stay tuned!” More information about this project is available on Tara’s weblog.