The personal blog of Eric Skiff

Following in the footsteps of our SpreadFirefox NYTimes ad, a group of OpenOffice.org volunteers organized a fundraiser to run a full page ad on the back of today’s metro. I contribued to the effort and was pleasantly surpised to see the ad greeting me as I went to pick up a copy of the metro this morning.

Because it was on the back of the free paper, about 1 in 4 people on the train was holding up the paper, proudly displaying the ad to all the commuters across from them.

I’m extremely happy to see the ad run and proud to be a small part of making it happen. My one regret is that ad doesn’t say anything about the community of volunteers and donors who put the ad there – that was the strongest part of SpreadFirefox message in my opinion. I’m afraid many New Yorkers will look at this ad and think “what’s the catch?” Without explaining that it’s a community effort (both the ad and oo.org itself) we lose the implied trust that comes from knowing that normal people put up their hard earned cash to get that ad there.

That said, it’s an amazing start, and I imagine that OpenOffice.org will have a nice spike in traffic today! If you haven’t checked out OO.org yourself yet, give it a try. You can install it on just about any machine you’ve got, and it won’t interfere with your existing office installation if you just want to give it a spin.