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SitePoint Podcast #126: The Yolk’s On Us

Episode 126 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week the panel is made up of our full team of regulars, Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict), Brad Williams (@williamsba), Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy) and Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves).

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Episode Summary

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Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/126.

Host Spotlights

Interview Transcript

Louis: And here we are again for another episode of the SitePoint podcast. We actually have, I know it’s hard to believe at this point, but the entire panel is here, all our regular hosts, Brad, Stephan and Patrick, hi guys.

Stephan: Howdy.

Brad: Hey.

Patrick: Hey, Louis. What was that, Brad, did you croak over there?

Brad: I’m sorry I’m a little horse today so I’m going to power through it, but hopefully I don’t sound too bad.

Louis: No lightening storm or hail or sleet, however that thing goes (laughter).

Brad: I survived.

Patrick: Weather permitting we’ll finish the show together.

Louis: Awesome, guys. So, well, let’s kick right into it. Alright, let’s go with the big story this week, it’s not really a web story but it does have — I can see it’s a web story and it does have something do with the Web, so we’re going to talk about it a little bit. And this is that Google has agreed to purchase the mobile division of Motorola.

Patrick: Yeah, and everyone kept saying in their reports, Motorola Mobility, Motorola Mobility, I’m like why don’t you just say Motorola, but then I looked at the company’s website and there is Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions which is the part of the company that provides mission critical communications products like two-way radios and wireless network infrastructure, and these things, so Google is essentially buying just the mobile consumer focused part of the company.

Louis: Right. Obviously this is more of an Android story than anything else, right, because Motorola sort of rescued itself by committing itself to making Android phones a couple years ago, and they’re one of the major makers of Android hardware, and now Google has this sort of vertically integrated stack where they’re making the hardware themselves.

Stephan: It’s basically one of the intellectual properties, right, of the hardware I think is what they were going after, am I wrong?

Patrick: I read something about that in a story at ReadWriteWeb about how they’re dealing with some different patent challenges and how Motorola has this huge portfolio of patents, I think it was somewhere around like 7,500 patents and 15,000 pending, or 15,000 patents and 7,500 pending, but they have just a wealth of patents.

Louis: Yeah, that’s a really interesting take on it and I’ve read that as well. It’s interesting in light of a couple of things, one is this recent court decision in Europe to ban sales of Samsung’s Galaxy Tablet because they thought it was infringing on some of Apple’s patents or Apple’s intellectual property in the design of the iPad.

Stephan: Interesting. So you think this could be a take on that? Well, if the Motorola can sell — if Motorola can sell in Europe then it gives us an in, in Europe, possibly.

Louis: Maybe. And also just maybe this whole patent escalation thing, it’s like a cold war of both sides arming up with massive stockpiles and it becomes mutually a sured destruction, right?

Stephan: Yep.

Louis: Apple goes after a couple another couple of Android Tablets and then suddenly Google has got all these backlog of patents covering who knows what. There was a list of stuff in there and it was tons and tons of stuff, like stuff on 3G and 4G and H264, and like just tons and tons of — it’s an arsenal, right, it seems like — it really seems like cold war escalation to me.

Stephan: And even in Google’s press release on the Google Blog, they say that, “Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio which will enable us to better protect Android from competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.” So, I mean they’re kind of coming out and just saying it, right?

Louis: Yeah.

Brad: What about the openness of Android, is that something we need to worry about?

Louis: I mean obviously their statement has been that Android will remain open. It is interesting what this means for the other manufacturers out there, so particularly I guess HTC and Samsung, to a lesser extent I guess Sony Ericsson and LG makes a couple Android phones.

Patrick: Yeah, I’m trying to get the article from ReadWriteWeb up, and it was funny, they had quotes in the press release from people at four manufacturers including LG and Samsung and two others, and it was funny because all of them use the same word, ‘welcome’, ‘we welcome’, ‘I welcome’ Google’s deal. And it was like could someone stop the last three guys to respond and say you know what, we already got the word welcome in the first one, can you change the verbiage on those so they don’t all sound like the same person wrote them, it was kind of funny. But obviously Google’s looking for support of the deal from manufacturers because regulars are going to look at this deal and consider the implications of it to the marketplace and if it should be allowed to happen. I suspect that they’ll be allowed to do it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t need to start selling it now.

Louis: Yeah, I mean there’s plenty of competition out there, and it’s not like — yeah, I really don’t see it as that much of an issue in terms of that. And I think it’s probably definitely still in Google’s best interest to keep it open and keep having these other manufacturers involved in making Android devices.

Patrick: Right, right. And the number of patents I think it’s 17,000 patents for Motorola with 7,500 pending, so those are the official numbers here; I couldn’t get the story from RWW but from the New York Times story I was able to find that number, so it’s a big deal.

Louis: Right, yeah.

Brad: So I had the privilege of attending WordCamp San Francisco last weekend, this past weekend, which is pretty much the largest WordCamp in the world, and it’s where the first WordCamp was held I believe back in 2006, but it’s essentially a who’s who of everybody and anybody in the WordPress industry, and Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer, or one of the founding developers of WordPress gives his annual State of the Word address at the this event, and he actually released some interesting stats that I thought we might chat about a little bit. And one that really caught my attention is the stat, and according to Matt this was provided by an independent research firm and they said they’re going to release the stats and the numbers and where they came from soon, but for right now he just gave us the stat itself and it’s 22 of every 100 active domains created in the U.S. are running WordPress today. And that’s obviously an extremely large number, 22, so basically 22% of every active domain purchased in the U.S. is powered by WordPress or WordPress is installed on it. It got me thinking; do you guys think that’s a good thing or a bad thing for the Web?

Patrick: It’s an interesting question. It’s funny; when I talk about forums and forum software I sometimes bring up WordPress because with forums we have a lot of different platforms that are good platforms I would say. I could name six or more that are reasonable forum platforms that you can go and install right now and use to a level of success and have good communities behind them, good ecosystems behind them. When I think about blogging software I don’t feel that same way, I know there are other good platforms out there, there’s different CMS software as well, different publishing platforms, but to me it feels like WordPress has this sort of domination of the space right now, and it’s good for WordPress, WordPress shouldn’t do anything about it, WordPress can just be as good as it can possibly be, but I’m not sure that it’s a great thing for everyone, and WordPress is a great piece of software so it’s not like I’m saying you shouldn’t use WordPress, but I think it’s good to have viable competitors generally, and it’s hard to see that right now with blogging software.

Brad: Yeah, the way you also call it blogging software is interesting, too, because I think a lot of people still consider WordPress blogging software when it’s certainly extensible and you can do almost whatever you want, but for the longest time it was created as a blogging software, so to lose that kind of tag on WordPress that it’s only for blogs has certainly been a challenge for it, but the fact that so many sites are running it now I feel like it is kind of breaking through that barrier and people are realizing it’s much more than that and it is a full fledged content management system.

Patrick: Yeah, well I said CMS and publishing platform as well, I’m just getting all the buzzwords right out there (laughter). Louis, what do you think?

Louis: Well, okay, so here’s the thing, 22% of every 100 active domains created in the U.S., to me that sort of means that this is a volume game, right, and to be fair I think most of those domains don’t matter. I think there’s such a proliferation of these little micro auto-blogs and sort of crap sites that people churn out to try and flip for a couple of bucks or make passive revenue on that are all crap, right.

Patrick: None of those are our listeners, right, Louis?

Louis: Of course not! (Laughter)

Patrick: Please vote for us in the .net Magazine Awards! Go, Louis.

Louis: (Laughter) What I’m saying is like if you look at new domains registered, that doesn’t represent most of the traffic or the quality of websites out there, and that’s not saying that WordPress wouldn’t be used on quality sites, of course it is, it’s used on SitePoint.com, right. The point I’m trying to make is that those numbers might be misleading because for the sort of — for that category of user who’s churning out a lot of these sort of quick one-off blogs to try and get SEO juice or to try and flip them for a couple of bucks, WordPress is going to be an appealing choice because it’s really easy to install and throw some content up there and is a big ecosystem, but that doesn’t mean it’s something that they want to use ongoing or that they want to customize heavily. So, if you look at the big numbers game you’ve got a lot of sort of data in there that I don’t think really matters to the Web, I don’t know if you see what I’m saying here.

Patrick: Yeah, I see where you’re going with it. I mean it’s funny because that is something that happens with a platform that becomes as easy to use as WordPress is, right, and it’s easy to flip on, flip your website into whatever you need it to do, and it has that sort of mainstream appeal where when people do want to launch one of those quick websites it’s there for them, or even beyond that, WordPress.com makes it even easier without needing to run any software at all.

Brad: Yeah, and the other stat that has been talked about before, so it’s certainly not a new stat, is the one that basically is of the top million websites in the entire world WordPress is powering 14.7% of those, so that is certainly a little truer stat, because like you said, Louis, the new sites that are popping up a good majority of them are never going to be seen by almost everyone on the Internet. Whereas when we’re looking at top million websites almost 15% of those are running WordPress, those are the sites that people are going to; it’s certainly the most actively used content management system out there.

Patrick: And those numbers I just pulled up let’s drill on those for a second because I found them interesting, they were linked in Matt’s post from W3text.com, it’s a historical look at the usage of CMS systems for websites, and none is 73%; 73% of the top I guess one million websites, that’s what Matt is saying this is for, don’t use any of these listed software applications, most of these platforms are popular CMS blogging forum software solution, so WordPress is the number one defined option, 14.7%, Joomla! 2.7, Drupal 1.7.

Louis: I’m actually really surprised that Joomla’s higher than Drupal on this list.

Brad: I actually was too when I saw that.

Patrick: And looking at similar platforms ExpressionEngine comes in at .3, I guess Blogger .8%, and those are the ones I’m familiar with. And then I see some forum platforms here and that kind of illustrates my point with forum software, vBulletin at 1.4 is not — doesn’t have that commanding lead necessarily that WordPress has over similar platforms; PHPBB is next at .4% and IP.Board at .1%. So, yeah, I think those are interesting numbers and WordPress obviously is dominant.

Stephan: Was there a distinction made between — I was going to ask was there a distinction made between WordPress.com blogs or sites and just WordPress.org installations?

Patrick: No, not from here it doesn’t look like it; I imagine they probably rolled them in to one because with some of these sites you can’t necessarily tell with the WordPress VIP service, right, Brad?

Brad: Yeah, in fact, one of the questions from the audience asked if WordPress.com is counted as the millions of sites that it has or as a single site, and Matt said it was counted as a single site.

Stephan: Interesting.

Louis: There’s another interesting thing here, this is a bit of a tangent at this point, but if you look from where this chart begins in August of 2010 going to August of 2011, the share of that none, which is the biggest chunk of shares, went from 79% last year to 73% this year, so the most significant trend here above and beyond the rise of WordPress from about 11 or 12% to 14% has been the decline in the sites that are sort of running on their own custom software, or maybe they’re the same amount but all the new sites are using WordPress; maybe I’m reading this wrong.

Patrick: No, that’s a great point, it is a great point. The top 100 million websites have moved off of custom coded or proprietary, or maybe not proprietary’s not the word, but maybe not publicly available or platforms you and I can purchase, to using those platforms more and more over a period of a year, like you said, 6.4% reduction. But none is still winning like Charlie Sheen, so. (Laughter)

Brad: I think in the industry out there a good reason for the number is these corporations are really starting to realize you don’t have to throw a ridiculous amount of money at something to be good. You can take WordPress or Drupal or a lot of these platforms out of the box are really, really good, and they’re free, they’re open source, whereas the old thought process was if it doesn’t cost a million dollars it must suck, and I think people, especially corporations, are starting to realize that that’s not necessarily true, they don’t have to have 50 in-house developers to run this custom coded solution that they built 10 years ago, they can migrate it over to something like WordPress or Drupal and there’s millions of developers all over the world that can work on that platform.

Louis: Yeah, absolutely.

Brad: So, I think that stat, that percentage, I think if we go back to this a year from now it’s definitely going to dip under 70%; I think we’re going to see it keep getting smaller and smaller.

Louis: Yep, definitely. Let’s talk briefly about this, so, what podcast listeners won’t know is that on the last panel show two weeks ago we spent about 10 minutes discussing a story that didn’t wind up in the final recorded version that you heard.

Patrick: This is because we’re super responsible people.

Louis: (Laughs) the reason for this is because it came out the day after we recorded that the story was in fact a hoax. This was the story, I don’t know if you saw it, about IE 6 users having a low average IQ. So it was this whole thing about this company that had set up these free online IQ tests and they were tracking people’s browser choice when they filled out these IQ tests, and it’d come out that on average users of IE had lower average IQ’s, now this was the whole thing was a hoax, and the guy came out and said he hacked the PDF together in 20 minutes, so yeah, we did get fooled and we talked about it, so yeah, what do we think about that?

Patrick: Well, I think it just makes us out to be the people that you’d like to date your daughter (laughter) because we pulled that story rather than spreading further disinformation, or incorrect information, and actually we have to credit Karn for being the first to tip us off on that, our producer Karn Broad who sent a link on it, if I recall correctly, to all of us saying that story you talked about, well, uh, –

Stephan: That was me. (Laughter)

Patrick: That was Stephan, okay, well, you know, Stephan, I credit you then for that, good job Stephan. But, yeah, so we pulled the story out, Karn pulled it out, and, I don’t know, I think it’s funny because I don’t know who was skeptical about it or not skeptical about it, but obviously it got a lot of attention, and I read a story about it at ReadWriteWeb, it linked to the guy’s website which is AptiQuaint, and he talked about how — there was one post he said where he’d been reading about memetics, he says, “I’m thinking of Dr. Richard Dawkins and the theory of evolution of life, and it was really amazing to see the same theory being applied to ideas or memes, according to the — theory of Memetics, survival of the fittest theory applies to ideas as well.” “Strong ideas survive, multiply and evolve over time, whereas weak ones die.” “So, frustrated with IE and the fact that you cannot have all four versions on one computer to test your website, I went on to create a meme that would result in some awareness and hopefully convince a few IE users to stop using it.” I don’t know if this could maybe be all that successful just because as we know a lot of the people who are stuck using IE 6 are stuck using it and it’s beyond their choice, right?

Stephan: Because they’re stupid.

Patrick: I mean it’s not like corporations are going to see this and say “oh my God, our workers are stupid, we better upgrade the browser now, deploy IT immediately, alert!”

Brad: It’s interesting, it doesn’t feel like that many people called this out from the start, it’s almost like everyone saw the headline, read the article and said, ah, I get it, I can see that (laughter).

Louis: Speaks to web audiences prejudices, right, I mean so very few of our audience use this, and I think Patrick actually pointed this out in the segment that we cut. I introduced the piece saying this might be controversial and Patrick said, “Nah, our audience is going to love this, they’re going to eat this up,” and I think that plays to why it didn’t get called out or why nobody looked at it. And in retrospect there’s stuff in there, right, he gave a sample size of a 101,000 people, that’s 101,000 people who clicked on an ad to fill out a free online IQ test and completed it, right, so you’re talking about a conversion rate of maybe 2%, that means you need hundreds of millions of pageviews to complete this kind of study, that’s ridiculous. But at the time we were all just like yeah, sure, whatever.

Patrick: Well, we don’t claim to be journalists (laughter).

Stephan: News, what news?

Patrick: We just spread disinformation around, I don’t know, but, anyway, if you want to read more about it the story at ReadWriteWeb goes into detail about how he went about putting it together, he registered a domain name on July 14th, and to speak to your point, Louis, threw up a WordPress install and copied the content from another business’ website, and then he changed the names of the staff members from that business but kept their headshots intact, and he also set up Facebook and Twitter profiles for this fake company; the Twitter profile was later suspended. And, you know, I don’t know, I see a good laugh here or whatever, but I got to say I don’t really care for this whole things, I don’t know, I definitely hold people responsible who pass on information, especially those at larger blogs and publications that maybe should do a little better due diligence. But at the same time the guy set out to deceive, so to me that always — I don’t know, I just can’t give my stamp of approval to that, I just can’t.

Stephan: I’d be happy to have that kind of time on my hands just to sit around and do that.

Patrick: I mean all he did was copy someone else’s website. I mean you can do that, Stephan (laughter).

Stephan: I can?

Patrick: It might improve your website. (Laughter) Sorry, that just ties into our private joke about Stephan’s website, but yeah, so IE 6 users no fear, no fear.

Louis: Awesome. Cool, another thing that happened this past week is, and this one I can’t figure out this story because Adobe has released a piece of software called Adobe Muse, which is the code name, it’s still in beta, and it’s in Adobe Air based WYSIWYG website designer, like it’s like front page for the 2011’s, I can’t figure it out.

Patrick: Is it Dreamweaver? Are you saying front page to be derogatory?

Louis: (Laughter) Well, yes, yes, clearly I am.

Brad: Yeah, I mean ten years ago maybe not, but 2011, yes.

Louis: But that’s the thing, it seems like I can’t imagine how — I mean maybe we’re just the wrong audience for this.

Patrick: Right. I’m the right audience but you guys are the wrong audience.

Louis: Okay, so here’s the thing, if you wanted to put up a website, Patrick, would your first reaction be like I’m going to download some software that’s going to write all the code for me and I’ll just draw some pictures and make a website, or would you ask somebody who knows how to write code to help you do it? Like that’s what I don’t get, right, there are people who do this; there are lots of people who do this, so it’s kind of baffling to me.

Patrick: I still see a need out there for editors like DreamWeaver or website creation tools that are good, I mean I see a need for that because not everyone knows someone who codes a website, and even if they do, who’s to say they code any better than what a good editor would code, right. I don’t know, I don’t see this as being without use, I think it’s the right type of person; for example, a lot of people create websites using GoDaddy’s website editor, okay, whatever you or I may think of that they’re still going to do it, so is Muse potentially better than that or are there other solutions for those people who would like to do it themselves in some way without knowing how to code, or maybe just don’t know anyone they feel comfortable asking? I ask the impossible question; Louis doesn’t know anybody like that (laughter) because anyone who knows Louis can just ask him to make a website for them for free and he’ll gladly donate his time at the drop of a hat for them to do it, so anybody related to Louis or Facebook friends, just ask.

Brad: Has anyone actually used this? I mean I’m curious because it says “create a website without coding,” does it actually allow you to get into the code if you need to or does it completely control that aspect of what you’re designing?

Louis: That is a great question to which I do not know the answer.

Brad: I mean I’m looking through the screenshots and it’s not real — it’s just a bunch of videos we need to watch.

Louis: I’m not seeing an editor thing. So is this actually — have they gone a step further, because usually these editors have this edit panel where you can go and switch over and see what’s actually happening behind the scenes, but maybe you can’t see that now, maybe it’s just –

Patrick: I was looking at the features page and there’s a lot of I would say not basic features that are mentioned here like sitemaps and laying out your website in a certain way, and using image editing through Photoshop or Fireworks to make adjustments. So, I don’t know, I think it’s interesting to see how they tie in; Adobe’s already strong development brands that they’ve been moving to the web based things or lighter versions of Photoshop and how a more basic user can take advantage of those.

Louis: I don’t know, to me it seems like Adobe’s kind of struggling to come up with these tools as some of their stuff is — like one of their big sellers in the past was the Flash authoring tool, and there’s probably been some decline in Flash over the years; increasingly developers are using free editors, so Dreamweaver will have seen a decline as well, and so on and so forth, and trying to come up with these new products. If you look a couple of weeks ago they announced Adobe Edge which is this sort of Flash-like animation tool but that does CSS and jQuery animations. I don’t know, it seems like they’re grasping at straws to me and trying to come up with products that might still be relevant and maybe this is one of these markets they’ve identified as people out there who don’t want to do code because people who do do code won’t use Adobe tools, I don’t know.

Brad: It is an interesting trend to see the subscription payments, I mean you can’t even just flatout buy it, you have to subscribe to a monthly fee which works out to about — because it will be $180 to $240 a year which is paid monthly, or I guess you can pay yearly.

Patrick: Yeah, you pay for a year.

Brad: Beta period’s free but then — so basically you can’t just buy it and go with it, you are essentially going to be paying ongoing if you plan on using this as your tool.

Patrick: We had kind of a long discussion about the subscription model when we talked about their announcement to make their popular apps like Photoshop and Dreamweaver and whatnot available via a subscription model, and I don’t know, if you buy the belief that this is for a more beginner audience, right, then you could also buy the belief that those people wouldn’t necessarily want to buy an editor, and like you said, there are free editors that they could use, but I don’t know, maybe this will appeal and maybe it won’t and they’ll stop it after six months.

Brad: I get having it as an option, but to have it as the only option is the weird thing, like if I would use this as my tool and I love this program, I would want to flatout buy it, I don’t need to upgrade every year, and I think that’s what they’re trying to get is the people like me that would not be upgrading every year; they’re going to get my money every year with this subscription method, so it’s a little bit of a scary trend I think.

Patrick: Everybody wants Brad’s money.

Brad: I’m just trying to keep it.

Patrick: So I had a story that I thought would be — would make for a fun discussion. I read a report by Bloomberg that I found through TechCrunch about Nintendo.

Louis: I was just going to say, man, you’re reading Bloomberg looking for stories for the podcast?

Patrick: Well, you never know where you’ll find one.

Louis: (Laughs) are we spreading out? Are we doing financial news now?

Patrick: We might. No, I like financial news, but, anyway, so the story in Bloomberg is about Nintendo and how some of their investors want them to develop for mobile platforms and develop for the iPhone and iPhone apps and Android apps and kind of make a move into that market with their strong franchises like Mario and Zelda and Metroid and all those fun games. There are a couple different ideas and that’s why I think it’s fun for us to discuss, which are as follows. So, Nintendo is obviously the strong company, strong brand, they have these great franchises, they’ve done very well with console games. This article is kind of spurned on by the fact that Nintendo3 DS sales haven’t been what Nintendo had expected so they had to cut price of the Nintendo3 DS, so investors are looking for ways to grow the revenue obviously, and they hear all the great news about mobile and how money’s being made and mobile is where gaming is going, you have Angry Birds, you have obviously the Zynga games and so on, so there’s an opportunity for money but on the other hand would it spread Nintendo too thin to do that; should they be focusing their creative efforts on developing for the mobile platform? Now, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said that as long as he’s in charge Nintendo will only make titles for its own products, that’s according to this Bloomberg article, so he doesn’t seem very optimistic about the idea. What do you guys think?

Louis: I would pay $5.95 for Super Mario Bros. on my Android phone.

Patrick: Okay, would you do that 10 times? No, I’m just kidding.

Louis: I would do it now; if it was available I would do it now.

Patrick: Now, I’m just thinking about the Nintendo Wii, the virtual console, sorry, where you can buy old versions of games, and how much a game costs; Legend of Zelda costs 500 points, and if I’m not mistaken $1.00 equals 100 points, so that is $5.00 for the original Legend of Zelda, and that would be as a download for the Nintendo Wii console. So, theoretically that pricing is already there, but I think one of the counterpoints here is that people aren’t used to paying that much, people buy apps for a dollar or two, they don’t usually pay $5.00 for apps. Stephan?

Stephan: But if they really want Super Mario Bros. or they really want Zelda they’re going to pay it, right, and I think the key here is the investors are who Nintendo has an obligation to, as well as employees of Nintendo. So, you would think they would want to do what’s right for the company, and in this case I think what’s right for the company is trying to expand their user base, because not everybody is going to own 3D, what is it called, Nintendo 3D, I’m not, I don’t have the use for another thing, but I own an iPhone and I might just buy Super Mario.

Patrick: But how many would you buy and would it be just for the novelty of it or would it be a regular thing you’re going to pick up games and play them?

Stephan: Yeah, I might buy Zelda if it’s five bucks, I would probably buy Zelda or I’d buy Super Mario Bros., but the point is that you’re making $10.00 right there that you wouldn’t have made from your 3D game console.

Louis: I think that maybe the thing here is Nintendo has this — they’ve been making hardware for, what, nearly 30 years now, is that right, am I doing the math right on there?

Stephan: If not more.

Patrick: Yeah.

Louis: Nearly 30 years of making gaming hardware, so they have this whole supply chain of factories and distribution integrated already built into the structure of the company that is all about distributing hardware, and this kind of shift to something that makes games available on other people’s hardware is maybe a big shift for them, it’s something that they’re not used to doing and that might be what’s scaring them and what’s concerning here. And the other question is Nintendo too big a company? We look at Angry Birds made however many millions of dollars and that’s seen as a huge success in this kind of startup mobile game market, but for a company the size of Nintendo is that amount of sales — does that even cover payroll for a month? Does that even make — is that a drop in the bucket?

Patrick: Right. And I got to say I think either way Nintendo I don’t think is necessarily going to cater to investors or employees or anyone by moving to mobile, I mean obviously that’s a business strategy decision, I can see it going either way. And like you said, Louis, I don’t know if the revenue will be substantial enough for them to really do that, and one might suggest that they shouldn’t dedicate their resources to developing on the mobile platforms just yet, I don’t know that there’s anything wrong with holding off even longer or even not going in that direction right now. And there’s a sense at least, I read the TechCrunch article, and the author of that article wasn’t a fan of the idea, John Biggs, he says that what the investors are doing, to use a sports analogy, they’re telling Nintendo to trade their best players because of a down season, referring to the 3 DS sales not being as well as they hoped. He says, “Nintendo’s real treasure isn’t the hardware or even the software, per se, it’s the goodwill, brand awareness and nostalgia associated with their top games.” “Nintendo has more console exclusives than any other device manufacturer and they’re going to keep it that way for as long as they can,” investors hopefully be damned. And I mean I can see the point there and you could also say that mobile might even further that nostalgia, of course, by releasing those old games on those platforms. But, I don’t know, do you want to see Nintendo alongside Zynga or alongside Angry Birds, is that where the Nintendo brand should be playing? It seems kind of strange to me.

Stephan: But is it an option between that or do they do the way of Sega and just go away?

Patrick: Well, I think that decision has already kind of made its way, I mean Sega lost because of — not because they weren’t moving and releasing games for other platforms, it’s because there other platform wasn’t as widely adopted; I don’t think Nintendo’s in that spot of weakness.

Louis: I mean the Wii is strong and they’re going to continue, I think they’ll continue to do fine off that, because they’re right now in a position where the gaming console market is split sort of three ways between two high-powered gamer focused device and one sort of consumer level thing that everyone has fun playing, and they’re in a really good spot with that, so I don’t think they’re going to go away.

Stephan: I think that the Wii they’re fine, right, I mean that’s okay, but if you’re saying to me that this 3DS platform was so important to them that they had to reduce the price, then either get rid of the platform or come up with a different way to market it or something, and I don’t see them doing that, I mean they’ve reduced the price and has it worked, I mean I don’t know, I haven’t seen any sales numbers on it. But apparently the investors aren’t happy, and the investors aren’t happy because they’re probably losing some money somewhere, right. I don’t know, it’s an interesting take because how do you take something, like you said, Patrick, there’s very much a niche market here, there’s very much this niche of nostalgia, I love — I still have an old Nintendo, I love Nintendo, but at what point do we say, okay, they have to adapt to more before — or they die. And the Wii is a good starting point, but I think they’re going to have to do more than that.

Patrick: Right. And according to Wikipedia article, I’m reading the citation, the DS shipped 4.32 million units worldwide through July 28, so even though it may not be at their expectations it’s obviously sold and moved plenty of units.

Stephan: But compared to what other mobile platforms?

Patrick: I only can get one number at a time. (Laughter)

Stephan: Let’s compare it to Sony or something like that is what I’m saying, you compare it to the Sony product or you could even compare it to maybe the iPad, is that fair?

Patrick: Well, Nintendo has crushed everyone when it comes to mobile gaming, so to compare it to Sony I think I’m pretty sure the Sony numbers would be far below it; the Nintendo DS would probably be the next comparison because I think it’s the best selling handheld gaming console of all time, the predecessor to the 3DS.

Louis: Anyway, I got one last story before we close for today, and that’s something we’ve been a little bit off topic as far as the web developer type audience goes for most of this show so I’m going to try and bring it back. This week marked the release of version 2.0 of the HTML5 Boilerplate by Paul Irish and a bunch of other cool people. They’ve added some new developers to the team including Mathias Bynens who we talked about on the show before, and Nicolas Gallagher, so a couple of new developers, the project is really growing, and there’s a lot of cool new stuff in there, they’ve changed the way the CSS reset works, whereas before it was a full sort of bulldozer reset that destroyed all default styles in the browser so that if you wanted, for example, and em to appear italic you had to specifically declare that, now it’s using this other CSS script called Normalize.css which does a better job of normalizing the behavior across browsers to arrive at a set of sensible defaults, and a bunch of other stuff. So if you check out HTML5boilerplate.com, have a look at the new version, if you haven’t been using the Boilerplate it’s a great way of getting started with HTML5 and using sort of all of the current best practice for everything bundled into one set of HTML and CSS files. So, spotlights, guys?

Patrick: So my spotlight is the greatest anti-plagiarism video I’ve seen, those are the words of Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today, I co-host another podcast with Jonathan, and I shared this video which was created by the University of Bergen from Norway, so hopefully I’m not butchering the pronunciation, Stephan might know, I don’t know, but this anti-plagiarism video is basically a spoof of A Christmas Carol with references to Dirty Harry, CSI, Ozzy Osbourne, Thriller by Michael Jackson and more. The video itself is in Norwegian, obviously, but if you click on the closed caption icon on the YouTube embed you can view the English subtitles, and it doesn’t hurt it at all, you can’t understand the words they’re saying, it’s just a really funny video title, A Plagiarism Carol, and you know I got a kick out of it, so check it out.

Louis: Alright, will do.

Stephan: My spotlight is a website called Fauxgo.com, f-a-u-x-g-o.com, and it’s a website, it’s just a Tumblr website that’s put together a bunch of logos from different TV shows and movies, so they’re fake logos, hence the name Fauxgo, and it’s really funny, there’s like the Cobra Command logo’s on here from GI Joe, the Shady Oaks Retirement Village from Up, it’s just a good collection, it’s funny to look at and I’m sure they’re going to keep it.

Louis: It’s got Aperture Laboratories from Portal, and what’s the one at the top, Duff Beer.

Patrick: From the Simpsons, yeah.

Stephan: Oh, yeah! (Laughter)

Louis: I felt like I didn’t need to specify that one, but –

Patrick: Captain obvious over here! I like the caption for Cobra Command, “Morons, I have morons on my payroll!”

Stephan: (Laughs) GI Joe.

Brad: Alright, I guess I’ll go ahead next if we’re done with that one. So mine is actually a pretty interesting article on Smashing Magazine, and it is a review of about a dozen cross browser testing tools, all different tools you can use. I’ve heard of a majority of these, there are actually a few on here I hadn’t heard of so I’m going to go through and check them out, but they kind of go through each tool, show it off, just a quick blurb about what it does and how it works, and then at the bottom of the article they have a nice grid that kind of compares all the features and prices, about half of them are free, the other half cost money, anywhere from a few bucks a month to thousands a month, so this is something that we could all use more of I’m sure because we’re always cross browser testing, so I thought I would share that with everybody.

Patrick: Do you just use the free options or do you use any paid ones?

Brad: I typically just use the free ones unless I’m running into a particular hairy issue, and I have a lot of different environments set up so I can actually just fire up the browsers anyways; the trickiest one is like the IE 6, and I’ll typically go with the IE tester program, but that only works on Windows so if you’re trying to do IE 6 testing on the Mac you’re going to need to get something probably browser based or actually fire up a Windows Instance.

Patrick: Yeah, Adobe BrowserLab looks pretty cool, I hadn’t heard of that.

Brad: Yeah, that ones getting pretty popular, it’s been around for a little while now.

Patrick: I see the IE tester one does IE 5.5 plus, and Browser Cam does IE 5.2 plus, so even farther back than IE 6.

Louis: If you’re still testing for IE 5 you’re dead to me.

Brad: You should be paying a few thousand a month for something like that.

Patrick: How much would you pay to be able to test on IE 2? Name your price.

Louis: The question is how much would you charge a client who asked you to test on IE 2? We can do that, but –

Stephan: I’d fire the client (laughter).

Patrick: Everyone has a price.

Louis: Everyone has a price, you say? I don’t know, I’m not sure about that.

Patrick: That will cost one million dollars.

Louis: So, first of all, I have to apologize straight up because it’s an infographic and I know we’ve probably over done infographics with spotlights, but I just saw this one and it kind of ties in to something we talked about on a panel a couple of shows ago so I wanted to bring it up. It’s at Hunch.com, so Hunch is this, if you haven’t used it it’s this sort of thing that you answer a bunch of questions and it tries to guess information about you, it’s kind of this funny little game that you can play online, I don’t know, did you talk about that on a show with Kevin back in the day or am I misremembering something?

Stephan: Yeah, we did mention it I believe.

Louis: Anyway, so this one in particular is just an infographic of all the sort of statistics about questions, the differences between iPhone and Android users, and in this case it’s just this big list of things that are different, but what I wanted to specifically mention is we were talking about the iPhone being dominant in in-flight Wi-Fi, remember that a couple of weeks ago, and what I specifically wanted to mention is there’s some stats from here relating to the thing we were talking about a couple weeks ago about iPhone users, and I came up with this sort of pie-in-the-sky hypothesis that the reason that iPhone use was more prominent in in-flight Wi-Fi is that in-flight Wi-Fi is pay-to-go, and I sort of offhand joked, “iPhone users are just used to paying for stuff,” and here are some good stats in here. One of them is iPhone users are 26% more likely to prefer spending their money whereas Android users are 29% more likely to prefer saving their money. So there’s a lot of cool, weird, goofy stats in here, but I wanted to bring that one up because I think it lends credence to my ridiculous hypothesis.

Patrick: Interesting, yeah, I’m reading through some numbers here. Yeah, I mean these results were compiled through an ad placed on Google AdWords, click on the ad and then you fill in — (laughs) no, I’m just kidding, no. But it does say that iPhone users are 60% more likely to be American Express cardholders, which is, I don’t know, that’s kind of interesting, and 67% more likely to have an annual income of $200,000 or more, so that plays right into it; they have more money, they have additional credit cards. Also it says they have American Express cards, like I don’t know, but it does say they’re 39% more likely to say that they’re high maintenance. So they need that Wi-Fi in the air or lookout.

Louis: It’s probably pretty goofy, this is just collected from people answering random questions, but it’s got a lot of stuff in there about their favorite books or TV shows and all sorts of stuff, so have a look, it’s goofy.

Stephan: There’s some funny stuff in here, too, like Android users are 36% more likely not to remember their last vacation, so they have Alzheimer’s (laughter).

Patrick: They just work harder than these Apple iPhone lazy — no, I’m just kidding.

Stephan: There’s just some goofy stuff in here, Yahoo Mail, 50% more likely to use Yahoo Mail; they’re Android users, you think they’d use Gmail, that just cracks me up (laughter).

Louis: Yeah, that one doesn’t even make any sense.

Patrick: And here’s one related to you, Stephan, actually, iPhone users are 55% more likely to have taken several free flights this year using frequent flyer miles.

Stephan: That’s because they all read my blog (laughter).

Patrick: And the one post ever two months.

Stephan: That’s a good one, I like that one, I’m bookmarking this, yep.

Louis: Yeah, it’s cool even if you haven’t — whether or not you like this infographic or whatever, it’s worth having a play around on Hunch.com because they’ll just give you recommendations and you answer a bunch of goofy questions like this, and it’s fun to do even if you don’t really care about the recommendations, just answering these kind of stupid questions can easily kill 20 minutes. Alright, guys, well that’s a wrap for the show this week, that was a pretty long one, so let’s reel it in.

Brad: I’m Brad Williams from WebDevStudios and you can find me on Twitter@williamsba, and quickly I want to give a shout out to a gentleman named Sean Cochlan who I met over the weekend, and he’s a big fan of the show, a loyal listener, he’s been around since the start and just a really great guy, so thanks for coming up and introducing yourself, Sean.

Patrick: Awesome, thanks Sean. I’m Patrick O’Keefe of the iFroggy Network, iFroggy.com, and I Tweet @ifroggy, i-f-r-o-g-g-y.

Stephan: I’m Stephan Segraves, you can find me on Twitter @ssegraves and I blog at Badice.com every now and then.

Louis: (Laughs) Every now and then. And you can follow SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, that’s SitePoint d-o-t-c-o-m, or follow me on Twitter @rssaddict. You can go to Sitepoint.com/podcast, that’s the place to go if you want to leave a comment on the show or get any of our previous episodes or subscribe to the show’s RSS feed. I also want to throw in one more plug for our nomination in the .net Awards, voting is still open, so if you go to thenetawards.com you can cast your vote for your Favorite Podcast of the Year, I’m not telling you who to vote for, I’m just saying, you know, throw us a bone. Thanks for listening and bye for now.

Theme music by Mike Mella.

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