SitePoint Podcast #177: Non-Passive Income

Episode 177 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week we have 3/4 of the panel, Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict), Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy) and Kevin Dees (@kevindees).

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You can download this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:

SitePoint Podcast #177: Non-Passive Income (MP3, 32:04, 30.8MB)

Episode Summary

The panel discuss topics such as Facebook’s Big Data, passive income for developers, and 3 Youtube spotlights!

Here are the main topics covered in this episode:

Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/177.

Host Spotlights

Interview Transcript

Louis: Hello and welcome to the Sitepoint Podcast. We’re back this week with our regular news and commentary show. With me on the show are two-thirds of the regular panel of guests, Patrick O’Keefe and Kevin Dees. Hi guys.

Kevin: Howdy, howdy.

Patrick: And together we make up three quarters of the hosting lineup.

Louis: Now that we’ve dazzled our audience with our ability to do basic fractional math, we can move on to talking about the web. First up, I have to apologize to listeners for the abysmal quality of my audio. My microphone was outputting a lot of static and I couldn’t figure out how to make it stop. I rebooted, I changed the USB cable, I did all the things and none of them worked. So I am recording this on the built in microphone in a laptop which is in a big echoy room, so apologies for that.

Patrick: Sorry. I was going to say Kevin even offered his USB cable from Greenville, SC, USA to Louis who’s in Australia.

Louis: You know.

Kevin: It’s the thought that counts.

Louis: Yes, it is the thought that counts.

Patrick: It’s the thought. Well maybe one day we’ll have the printers, you know those 3D printers. I’m reading about them all the time now. It seems like there’s more and more videos where they have 3D printers. How far can we be from printing out cables?

Louis: It can’t be that far, yeah. Although cable has got, you do metal in at as well. So it might be a little more difficult than just printing out a plastic wrench.

Kevin: I have to ask, while we’re talking about technology, before we get too far into the weblinks-

Louis: Aren’t we always talking about technology?

Patrick: Occasionally.

Kevin: Yes. I just heard about this Raspberry Pi thing. When did that come out? I just heard about it today.

Louis: It was a few months ago. I have a, one of my friends here at work the lead designer for Flippa is big into physical computing, has been working with Arduino for quite some time. He’s built this code library for Arduino that sort of controls his greenhouse with the humidity sensors and temperature sensors to control the greenhouse. He’s built an open source library to do that. He was really looking forward to the Raspberry Pi when it was announced. There was a big delay in shipping because the demand was pretty high.

For anyone who doesn’t know the Raspberry Pi is this tiny little computer board that runs the ARM chip set which is the same as what you’ll find in most smart phones. It has, now someone will have to correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it’s got component audio output, a few USB ports, HDMI, a few other things. And it’s just this tiny little board. It’s about the size of a business card. If you want to do kind of any sort of embedded computing, I think it also has ethernet right because it does…

Kevin: Yes, it does.

Louis: ….network activity, yeah. Anyone who wants to put a computer inside of something, a little board this small and it’s really inexpensive as well. I think it’s what, about $30.00 or $40.00, something like that.

Kevin: Yes, I think they said it was like $30.00 bucks.

Patrick: Yes, $25.00, $35.00.

Louis: Yes, so for all the tinkerers out there. I know a lot of people here were really excited. What we’re you saying, Kevin?

Kevin: No, I was just curious if it had come out recently. I just heard about it today. I’ve been so out of touch with technology here recently. So it was kind of like one of those things I was like, “Man, I need like six of those”

Patrick: Yes, actually a friend of mine, Tanner Smith, just posted on Google+ today that he had got his Raspberry Pi all plugged in and he has a picture here of it running on a big monitor. The website for Raspberry Pi is raspberrypi.org. They have like a diagram of what is on the board. There’s an RCA video, audio port, a USB port, LAN, HDMI port, 250 megabytes of RAM, an SD card port and of course, the power. That’s what you’ll find on it.

Kevin: Right. I do a little bit of podcast and video, it would be cool to see if you can hook up like Skype to that thing, you know, because then you could run a bunch of Skype calls into like a mixer board and do like multiple channel coolness with it. I don’t know, I’ll have to check it out.

Louis: You should be able to. Skype runs on Linux and there are already builds of Linux for the Raspberry Pi. Obviously, most Linux packages are compiled for the X86 architecture, and ARM is quite a bit different. So my understanding is people playing with Raspberry Pi at the moment have been spending a lot of time compiling things. But, yeah, I don’t see why that would be impossible. There are definitely, I think there’s a build of arch Linux targeting arm that runs out of the box and just pop it on the SD card and boot it up. I imagine as well, that you could probably run Android on one.

Kevin: It’s going to be a fun little gadget to like check out. I need to go do some more research and buy like, like I said, six of them.

Louis: Yes, there was, like I was saying. There were a lot of issues with – they just hadn’t anticipated the amount of demand there would be. So there was a point at which you could only order one at a time per customer. I think that restriction has now been lifted because sort of backfilling the demand so I think they’re in full production now.

Patrick: Very cool.

Louis: All right, with that little deviation into the world of physical computing aside, let’s jump right into the web stories this week. I’ll go first. The story that really caught my eye this week is this little contest which comes from the folks at Stripe.

Stripe for anyone who’s unaware is sort of a web payment gateway that you could use in your web application. Similar, I guess, to what you’d get with World Pay or PayPal or Google Checkout. Just sort of a way of integrating payments into your app. What they’ve done is put together this little online game called “Capture the Flag”.

They did this last year except it was a little bit different. Last year it was all about server security. So you would log into a terminal and fudge around trying to get passwords and progress up to the levels all in a terminal. This year they’re doing a web edition, which is all about web security.

The concept is the same. It’s a series of levels. Each level provides you with sort of the code that’s running on the website, and you have to find the vulnerability, exploit it, that gives you the password to get to the next level, and so on and so forth. Once you’re up to the eighth level, you capture the flag and I believe they send you a t-shirt.

Kevin: That’s epic.

Patrick: Very good. The opening level is what, hack one of my forums or something like that? Something real easy?

[laughter]

Patrick: No, that actually sounds really cool. I love that idea of that, of I guess, what is it gamifying, making competitive sort of this skill that can, is a useful skill.

Louis: Yes. Exactly. I think it’s something that’s obviously really important. Not a lot of people pay as much attention to the security of their website. You know you might be vaguely aware of the idea of SQL injection or cross out request forgery but you know, not, and you have some idea of the best practice to prevent these attacks.

Unless you’ve actually gone through the process of trying to find a hole in someone else’s system, then you might not be as cautious as you should be. This is a great way of sort of turning it into a game, giving people the opportunity to play around with security and hopefully learn something.

I keep meaning to play this thing and I haven’t had a chance. I just picked it up just this morning before we started recording and found the solution to the first level which took me about five minutes, I guess. Then it was time to record and the second level, the obvious things I tried didn’t work, so I haven’t had a chance to go any deeper than that into it. I think they said in terms of the stats they’ve got, so far they’ve had 500 people win and capture the flag. It’s clearly possible.

Kevin: That’s 500 t-shirts.

Louis: Yes.

Kevin: The obvious I guess, sorry.

[laughter]

Patrick: I guess to put that in perspective you have 6,200 that have captured level zero, I guess. Is there level zero or does that just mean they haven’t captured anything?

Louis: No at level- yes, it’s zero, indexed of course.

Patrick: Okay, so, and then you have from percentage of people how many actually succeed? You know, a little under 10 percent.

Louis: Yes, not too, too bad.

Patrick: Yes, not too bad. Should it be harder? Should it be like hacking the Pentagon or something? Should there be like an ultimate level where it’s like someone stands alone as the gladiator at hacking?

Louis Yes, I don’t know. I mean first of all it was a little bit easier than I expected it to be because they show you what the back end code is. Which as an attacker you might not necessarily know, you’d just sort of be stumbling around to try and find…

Kevin: Yes, that’s helpful.

Louis In that case it was really easy for me on the first level. I don’t want to give away the first level, absolutely check it out. Learn something about web security, have some fun, and hopefully win a t-shirt if you’re good.

The levels all touch on different technologies. The first level was using Node JS. The second level was PHP and I imagine that there’s a bunch of other technologies in there as well. Whatever your background, whatever your interests, you’ll learn something.

Kevin: That’s very cool.

Patrick: My story today is about Facebook. And it was sent to me by a regular Sitepoint podcast listener, Chris Trynkiewicz. It’s about Facebook’s data, the size of the data. It’s in a story by Josh Constine at Tech Crunch and it it shares data from a presentation given by Jay Parikh who is the VP of Engineering at Facebook. He has a couple of slides here that are shown.

This is per day, this data is per day. So per day Facebook has 2.5 billion content items shared, okay. They have 2.7 billion “Likes”, 300 million photos uploaded. They have 500 plus terabytes of new data ingested every single day. They claim to operate the single largest Hadoop system in the world at over 100 petabytes of data stored at one single disk cluster.

That’s not like an official record or something but it is, he claims jokingly that it is larger than Yahoo’s. So, yeah, I mean I don’t know that there’s much to discuss here but it’s just, it’s mammoth. Think about the amount of data that Facebook has to wrestle with. Not just on a daily basis of course, but also the historical data. They’re adding 2.5 billion content items share to date, 2.7 billion “Likes”. I don’t even know, I couldn’t fathom what it takes to keep all of that running smoothly.

Louis: Yes, I’ll say exactly the same thing. I have no idea how you would even begin to go about that. You know, all these basic things you sort of take for granted when you’re building a website. Just, “Oh, if you want to find that record just look it up in the database”. All of that starts to fall over. You can’t just chuck all of that into one big mySQL database. Oh yeah, you just select it.

You can’t do any of the things that you’re used to doing. And everything has to be architected in a completely different way. That becomes probably their biggest challenge even more so then designing or writing the code for the applications, it’s just keeping the data together.

Kevin: Yes. At the end of the day, something like this, it’s called hire good talent.

Patrick: Right, yeah, and a lot of it I guess. I was watching an interview with this gentleman, Jay Parikh, and he’s VP of Engineering. I think the interview was seen at, I don’t know when it was but obviously probably semi recently, I think it said his team is about 600-plus people that he manages directly. Of course they have many more employees beyond that. One other note from this article is they are working on something called Project Prism.

Right now Facebook apparently stores all of their live evolving user database in one single data center. They have others that they used for redundancy and for other data. What they’re working on doing with Project Prism is physically separating the data but maintaining one view of it, and those are his words.

That means their live data set might be split up into the different data centers that they have. They have data centers in California, Virginia, Oregon, North Carolina, Sweden for example. Right now what they’re doing is when it gets too big for one data center they move it, they move the whole thing to another one that’s been expanded to fit it.

As Constine writes here it’s kind of a waste of resources. Think about how so, every time the data center gets too small you have to move the data to some other data center. I mean the warehouse is only going to get so big I guess, but, it’s amazing. I guess it’s kind of a problem that Facebook is, I don’t want to act like Facebook, I don’t want to put Facebook on a pedestal where they’re just, and say they’re experiencing things that no one has ever experienced. It does seem like that in a way that they’re pushing problems with data into areas maybe where no one has seen or only a few people have seen, and are kind of pioneering problems in a way.

Louis: Yes, absolutely. And I guess it’s stuff that isn’t necessarily that applicable to the rest of us. I mean we can look at this and sort of go, oh wow that’s interesting, and then we go back to working on, you know, a mySQL database with like maybe a master and a couple of slaves. That’s it I guess.

It is interesting and I guess the question becomes, is this going to become more normal or is it a challenge that’s going to face more and more companies in the future, just because people are on the internet more, this is more data, people are doing more different things. Or does that sort of remain concentrated? There are only a few companies that will have to deal with that amount of data.

Kevin: Yes. I was going to say, it will remain in the hands of a few just because Facebook and these other companies like Twitter open up their API to allow you to access that data. There’s no reason to incur the overhead it would take to aggregate that data where you can just query against their database for a set price.

Louis: To some extent. If you look at the latest developments in the Twitter API we’ll not, we won’t go into that because it’s a whole other story.

Patrick: Right.

Kevin: Yes, well, but the point being you don’t have to go and purchase a giant data center to get a lot of information about people.

Louis: I guess that’s certainly true.

Patrick: Yes, and even if it doesn’t apply to us directly it’s still, some of the things Facebook does, we can learn from, in the sense of, it it worked for Facebook then of course it will work for my small website.

Louis: Yes, absolutely.

Patrick: You know, and because they do talk about the tools they use and even some of the open source things that they’ve been a part of and they have a website that’s for developers, developers.facebook.com/opensource where they list these tools and tools their engineers contribute to. I mean there is some value I guess for the common web developer Joe, but other than that it’s like considering how, I don’t know, a high paid athlete spends their money.

Like, you know, A-Rod gets paid $275 million like for ten years. I mean very few athletes even get that money. To the average athlete that’s like “oh my gosh, how does he even make that much money?” But still, I guess he’s got to figure out whatever it takes to manage that amount of money. So even though it’s a rare problem it is interesting.

Kevin: There’s actually a service out there just, there’s this thing called “if this, then that”, and I have used this in the past. It lets you kind of query the different applications, Twitter, Facebook, Evernote, your e-mail. They have like basically 49 different channels that you can kind of hook into Vimeo, YouTube, all these other things, G-mail, to kind of build an app off of. If you need access to that kind of data at least you can get it in one place. It’s an interesting little application, you should check it out.

Patrick: I’ve actually wanted to get into that, it’s at IFTTT.com, but yeah I mean I just haven’t. It seems like it would be really useful just as a regular user not as some sort of larger data power play.

Kevin: Yes, yeah, no. I didn’t mean to ruin your great segue Patrick, but since you set me up so nicely for the article on Smashing Magazine about passive income. Since, I’ve kind of butchered the last two quite royally.

[laughter]

Louis: They weren’t butchered, they were just very entertaining. I think, I think the extended segue could become a trademark of Kevin Dees appearances on the Sitepoint podcast.

Patrick: Yes.

Kevin: Yes, well on that note….

Louis: Speaking of typography.

Kevin: Yes, speaking of typography, guys, let’s talk about passive income.

Patrick: You can sell fonts, did you know that?

Kevin: Yes exactly, exactly. You know I saw the title and the title appealed to me, sadly, more than, actually, the content within it. Just because it’s basically the title of the article is “Passive Income Strategies for Web Designers”. I kind of fall into web design but I’m more developer then designer.

It struck me as something that, “Hey, we can talk about different ways that maybe we generate passive income”. In the article he goes into talking about how just in a general sense, right, you can create passive income for yourself as a good way to, like, maintain cash flow during down times, that kind of thing. Some of the items that he mentions are like themes, icons, and vectors.

He also talks about doing a little bit of advertising, Patrick, which I know you have a lot of experience in. Also writing books, like little e-books not like a whole book. I don’t know how writing a full-fledged book would be passive income. You know, software as a service.

Louis: Well, it’s passive income after the book is published, right?

Patrick: Yes, once it’s done, it’s passive.

Louis: I mean, there’s no such thing as totally passive income.

Patrick: Right, right, I mean because when you put out a book if you want it to do well generally you have to do a lot of other things marketing wise, doing interviews, promoting it, whatnot. It’s kind of a constant thing. But that’s also true, I guess, with anything that, and I don’t mean to step all over you here, but anything that like the theme selling for example. You know, you can put your themes up for sale but if no one knows about them then you’re only going to make “X”. Whereas, if you invest time in marketing then you’ll make more than that.

Kevin: Right.

Patrick: Anyway, sorry.

Kevin: Exactly, yeah. That’s a good point.

Louis: Yes, I think he makes that point at numerous points throughout this article. It’s just sort of, you know, these things are only passive in the sense that you put something out for sale and it continues to generate some income. You still have to put the work into either generating the content or promoting it or supporting the people who buy the products.

Kevin: Yes. Support’s the big one you always forget about. Even just like when I do freelance work, it’s the constant e-mails and the constant phone calls. It’s like you always forget to add that in, and even for this passive income stuff you know, like, so running a blog, right. I did that for a little while, made a little bit of money off of blogging. It’s just like having to respond to comments and tweet about things and share it. I mean there’s a lot that goes into it. You don’t just get to write an article and be done.

Patrick: Right. And I think it’s fair to say with some of these things that you can just put them out and leave them. Because the author of the article mentions that, again, the theme work and how they stopped supporting the themes about a year ago. This theme continued to sell but it’s just that they stopped supporting them.

I mean if that’s a hard core full stop then they no longer do anything. They’re not updating them, they’re not answering e-mails. They just have themes listed that are slowly getting more and more out of date, unless with whatever platform they are themed for, I assume they’re a theme and not just a template design. That is slowly getting out of date and less valuable to people, but they’re still selling.

Yes, I mean it’s passive income is a fancy kind of pretty phrase that gets thrown around a lot. You know it’s often means more. In this case it almost means that you’re not the one who’s doing the individual sales, you’re selling, you’re not going out there as a salesman doing it, you’re listing it somewhere, then you’re promoting that listing, you’re allowing your presence to promote the listing.

Advertising, I mean it’s passive but it’s not really passive. Because it’s like you’re writing a blog, and you’re advertising. You’re not getting paid to blog, right? You’re not getting paid by some publication to write. The advertising you’re getting paid from and maybe it’s just a side thing, so you consider it passive, but really the thing that drives the advertising, the success of the campaigns and the pricing, is the traffic that’s driven to your blog. And what drives the traffic to your blog is updated and constant content. So it’s passive but it’s not.

Kevin: Right, that’s a good point.

Patrick: But any idiot can write a book, I mean.

Kevin: Yes, 10 dumbest things I’ve ever done, right? There’s a book right there.

Patrick: Sure, why not, why not. But I don’t know. you’re a designer, you said developer, obviously Louis’s a developer. I mean what have, have you guys tried your hand at any of these types of things? I mean Louis has a full time job so it’s not like he’s just like a free-lancer who’s looking for passive income streams. I don’t know, have you ever experimented with anything like this?

Louis: No, myself not. I do work.

[laughter]

Patrick: Not like the rest of us that just do that other stuff.

Louis: You know, if and when I move into doing freelance work, then absolutely. I think it’s a really good idea to have some of your income being more regular then just ‘work for hire’. Because then if you have a month where you don’t get as many contracts then you’ve got some other income coming in to sort of level that out. Other things that you can focus on if you’ve got projects in the work. But like I’ve said, yeah, I’ve only done straight up work for hire as a full time employee. Which I quite like because it completely obviates me of….

Patrick: Yes, I was going to say, note that. Flippa, you know, Flippa, Flippa note, he said, “if or”, not just “when, if”, so he’s very happy.

Louis: Yes, absolutely. I mean you know for me it just not having to think about any of this kind of thing is fantastic. I have a product that I’m paid to build and improve. Then yeah, on the weekends I do other things that are unrelated to building that product.

Patrick: Right, you leave work at work. What about you, Kevin?

Kevin: Yes, so I’m in the works of doing different little projects constantly. You know, most of the stuff I’ve released has been free. I have a few plug-ins on WordPress.org. Check them out, hack them, do whatever you want with them. I’ve tried my hand at some themes here recently. However, I haven’t released any of them yet.

What I’ve done as a developer, right, and just kind of trying to get this passive income going, is I’ve gone to like Dribble, the Dribble website, Dribbble.com. I’ve contacted one of my friends over there and some other people and just kind of said, “Hey, if you develop like a look and feel, right, because I’m not exactly a designer, I’ll convert this thing into HTML CSS and code it up in WordPress and we can put it out there and sell it to folks.”

We’ve been working on that. Because I do a lot of freelance work and sometimes I’ll have full time jobs in between or whatever, I don’t have a ton of free time on my hands. You know, between blogging and podcasting, you know there are a lot of things that go on in life and then keeping up with friends and family. It is tough to kind of put time into something that would be considered passive income. I’ve been working on this thing with this guy for almost 8 to 9 months now and it’s just a long process.

Louis: As the author of this blog post points out that the level of quality and expectations with regards to the WordPress themes or commercial WordPress themes has increased pretty significantly. The minimal level of expectation that was something that was extremely customizable, has widget areas, is responsively designed. Whereas before, it was, sort of, if you had a look and feel and it was HTML people would pay you $20.00 for that. Also the level of ongoing support that’s expected is pretty high at the moment as well.

Yes, I thought it was an interesting article but yeah, I’d love to hear from listeners what their experience is with quote, unquote passive income which as we’ve discussed in most of these cases isn’t actually all that passive. What people’s strategies are for keeping some, those of you who are freelancers that is to say, for keeping some kind of income flowing in from other sources then direct client work. Yes, let us know what your strategies are and we might talk about them on the next show.

Patrick: Speaking of that, on Episode 175, our last group show, we talked about text editors and code editors and what code editors we used. When I say “code envy” I say use that very, very lightly. And what editors you have used and we were glad to see a comment from a listener, Chad Warner, who his website is Optimwise.com. O-p-t-i-m-w-i-s-e.com. He says that he’s on Windows and his favorite editors are Notepad ++ with the NPPFTP plug in for quick changes, and Aptana studio for more involved work. I mostly work with CSS and I also tweak HTML and PHP for WordPress. Good to know, thanks for the comment there Chad. If like Louis said, if you have any thoughts on our last story or on the show in general or anything you’d like to share, please leave us a comment and we might just read it on the air.

Louis: Good. I’ve been meaning to do that kind of thing for a long time and I keep forgetting every time we actually record, so thanks.

Patrick: That’s why there are three or four of us, memories. We know, to what. Individually we’re very weak, together we’re stronger.

Louis: Together we’re sort of you know mediocre.

Patrick: Passable, we’re passable. Yes.

Kevin: A bundle of sticks is not easily broken. A bundle of joy is not easily broken either, so.

Patrick: Wow, very deep Kevin.

Louis: I don’t know what, but, you know. Hey, let’s just what do you say we do some spotlights, guys?

Kevin: That sounds great.

Patrick: Awesome. Who wants, it sounds great in theory, but who actually has one? I’ll go first, I’ll go first. I have this video.

Louis: Before you say your spotlight, Patrick. I have a guess as to what you’re going to share with us this week.

Patrick: Okay, I posted a link.

Louis: Let me just ask you. Is it really off topic?

Patrick: Oh man, it’s, yeah, I mean it’s off topic sure. It’s not web development related.

Louis: Does it involve the juxtaposition of two things that nerds might remember fondly from the 80’s?

Patrick: It does. Are you cheating?

Louis: No I’m not cheating. I think I saw you post it on Twitter, on Facebook earlier this week.

Patrick: Okay, I think you have a good guess, Louis. Now I’m going to have to scrap that spotlight and go with something else.

Louis: It struck me as like that is a guaranteed Patrick spotlight as soon as I saw it.

Patrick: Okay, yeah, and now I’ve got a new one, so hold on a second.

Louis: No, go ahead.

Patrick: No, I’m just kidding. Yes, my spotlight is a YouTube video and it is titled “GhostBuster’s theme on 8 floppy drives”. It’s exactly as it sounds. I mean it’s some old floppy disc drives doing the Ghostbusters theme. It’s really cool. I mean, I never owned one of these drives, like I’m not that old, no offense, but. It is really neat, it’s really cool.

This person on YouTube, MisterSolidSnake745, actually has released a ton of these. Videogame music, music for Yoshi’s Island, Games of Thrones, Pirates of the Caribbean, so forth and so on, and it’s just really neat. The Ghostbusters one really jumped out to me. Yes, I guess Louis you’ve already seen this, so what did you think?

Louis: Yes, it’s hilarious. You see the interesting…I didn’t remember those drives being that loud.

Patrick: Right

Louis: Clearly they were.

Patrick: Well, yeah, I mean, well I guess they were and also they’re kind of open. Were they this open back in the dark ages?

Louis: Yeah, well, I mean no, you had them in the case. Yeah, but nonetheless. In retrospect, I kind of have this vague memory of some pretty loud noises coming out of those. I wouldn’t have thought it was enough volume to really put this kind of thing together. It’s definitely very cool and obviously a lot of effort has gone into it.

Patrick: Yeah, maybe that’s why it needs multiple ones. Maybe that’s kind of the reason to kind of mash the sound together.

Louis: Yes, they sort of perform like a mini-floppy drive orchestra, right? There are different parts playing counter melodies. It’s very interesting.

Patrick: Yes, it’s neat. Also, I can only imagine back in the day’s it was like this sound competing with like the modem sound.

Louis: Yes, exactly.

Patrick: And you know, just fighting each other like some sort of massive fight between the tech gods of the era.

Louis: On that note, my spotlight this week is also located on YouTube.

Patrick: What? You stole my website Louis! God.

Louis: Yes, this is a little talk or a sort of a little video put together by Matt Magain who is ex-Sitepoint crew from Melbourne. He gave a talk at Web Directions, What Do You Know Conference just last week. This is the video that he used in that talk. It’s this cool little animation that he drew and recorded live sort of explaining what UX design is all about. So yeah, it’s really cool. I don’t know you may have seen other videos in a similar style, this sort of you know live white board drawing talk.

Patrick: Yes.

Louis: This one’s directly, it’s all about UX design, so check it out.

Patrick: Good to know Matt’s still out there doing stuff.

Louis: Yes, he’s actually been doing a lot of freelance work as it happens.

Patrick: He might just need that story then about passive income.

Louis: Exactly.

Patrick: But I’ll tell you. Speaking is not really passive, you know. I guess if you record it and then sell it, but no one really, I mean it’s not that common to buy those things. Yes, it takes a lot to speak so good job, Matt. Kevin!

Kevin: So cool. I also have a YouTube video, ironically.

Patrick: Oh man, we’re just sending so much to the Google, I mean so much of our souls.

Louis: Three for three this week.

Kevin: This is probably the coolest video of all time. I’m sorry guys, I think mine has more views then your videos.

Patrick: Not more than the Ghostbusters theme, but definitely more than Matt Magain’s presentation.

Kevin: You only beat me by like 200,000

Patrick: Yes, I did that.

Kevin: Yes, have you heard of Flight of the Concords, at all?
Please tell me yes.

Louis: Yes.

Patrick: Yes, I have, never seen it but yes.

Kevin: Oh my gosh. No.

Patrick: It or them necessarily, I guess is the right way to say that.

Kevin: You haven’t seen Indiana Jones and now you haven’t seen Flight of the Concords.

Patrick: Or Star Wars, any of them, right, you’re correct.

Kevin: Ahh. This is a really cool video of like this fundraiser that Flight of The Concords did. Basically, they interviewed these kids asking them like how they would raise money, and then they interpreted that into a song. And it is pretty hilarious actually. You kind of get to see the meaning behind the words of the song and where they came from, so it’s not like you would laugh at the song in general because it’s just kind of funny. But then you actually see why it’s funny and it’s like, “Wow, a lot of energy was put into this. It wasn’t just like some big joke”.

Patrick: Yes, you know I actually did see this clip and watched parts of it. Yes, it is really cool and it’s funny.

Kevin: That’s great, indeed. That’s my spotlight, another YouTube video.

Louis: All right, so it’s a You Tube trifecta for the spotlights this week. We’ll post all the links to the spotlights, as well as all the stories we talked about today in the show notes.

Hopefully by next week, I will have sorted out some microphone solution that is more suitable to recording radio on. I am really sorry about this week, guys.

All right, so you guys want to wrap it up?

Kevin: I am Kevin Dees at KevinDees.cc and @KevinDees on Twitter.

Patrick: I’m Patrick O’Keefe with the iFroggy network. I blog at ManagingCommunities.com on Twitter at @iFroggy.

Louis: I’m Louis Simoneau. You can find me on Twitter at @RSSaddict and you can follow Sitepoint on Twitter at @sitepointdotcom. That’s Sitepoint d o t c o m. You can go to Sitepoint.com/podcast to find all of our past episodes as well leave a comment on our shows. You can find us on iTunes of course and you can also e-mail us. The address is podcast@Sitepoint.com.

That’s all for this week. Thanks for listening and bye for now.

Produced by Karn Broad.

Audio Transcription by SpeechPad.

Theme music by Mike Mella.

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