On June 17th, the day Firefox 3 was released, it got a mention in The Colbert Report during an interview with Johnathan Zittrain about his recently published book The future of the Internet – and how to stop it, referring to the many threats polluting it.

Stephen Colbert: Believe me, I’m all in favor of scaring the shit out of public. But I don’t understand. You give me the tools to frighten them.

Johnathan Zittrain: I don’t mean to be too alarmist…

SC: Oh! No, no, no! Please!

JZ: But it’s true. If you visit the wrong web site with the wrong browser, that could be it.

SC: What’s the right browser?

JZ: Well, Firefox 3 was just released today.

SC: OK.

(Public applause)

JZ: You may want to give it a shot.

SC: Firefox 3 gets the Colbert bump.

(Public applause)

The Colbert bump, -sort of a small digg effect or being slashdotted- actually spiked Firefox 3 download rate for a few minutes, according to Mozilla’s Ken Kovash, based on in his analysis of Mozilla download logs.