Kevin: The SitePoint Podcast episode 20, for Friday, June 24th, 2009: “YouTube Deep-sixes IE6”. Kevin: Hi, there and welcome back to the SitePoint Podcast - news, opinion, and fresh thinking for web developers and designers. I’m your host, Kevin Yank coming to you from SitePoint headquarters in Melbourne, Australia and I’m joined by my panel of co-hosts. Brad: Brad Williams from WebDevStudios. Patrick: Patrick O’Keefe from the iFroggy Network. Stephan: And Stephan Segraves from Houston, Texas. Kevin: On the show today, Microsoft Azure pricing and availability, the DiggBar is at it again, we check in with web fonts and HTML 5, and new research suggests some seemingly irrational trends in search engine marketing spending. But we’ve got a lot to discuss in this episode, so let’s just dive right in with YouTube dropping support for Internet Explorer 6. “Woohoo!!!” is all I have to say about this one. Wow! Brad: We need the “hey, hey goodbye” sound clip. Kevin: Yeah. I’ve been saying that all it would take to get Internet Explorer 6 out the door is for a big site to stop supporting it and what bigger site is there, except maybe Facebook, than YouTube. YouTube is displaying for Internet Explorer 6 users a bar across the page saying “get a modern browser because we are phasing out support for yours”. So, is this it? Is this the tipping point? Is this Internet Explorer’s death knell? Brad: This has to be the beginning of the end I think. Like you said, once a couple big players step up to the plate and actually lock out their sites for IE 6 users. Right now, they’re just displaying the message suggesting that the users upgrade their browsers and that they’ll be phasing out support but it doesn’t necessarily say that they’ll be not allowed to view the site at all in IE 6. So, I think once they actually force people to upgrade by not allowing them to access these sites that they like to go to, that’s when the end will begin, but I think this is the great first step. So, it’s a long time coming. Kevin: Even if YouTube starts developing features that don’t work in IE 6, are they ever going to shut the door completely on IE 6? I’m not sure that’s a smart idea for YouTube. Brad: Yeah, I’m sure they wouldn’t lock it down completely but they will just, like you said, if certain features aren’t supported, they will just hide them. So, technically, by them saying we’re not going to support your browser doesn’t mean they won’t be able to access the web site. It just may not work like it’s intended to work. But you’re right. I can’t see any major web site actually telling somebody to go away unless they upgrade their browser. Patrick: I mean, stats dictate it, right? I mean, they’re probably showing this announcement because the level finally reached a low enough portion of their browser share that they say, “Well, you know, we can maybe push people away from this and kill it off for good.” But at the end of the day, the stats dictate whatever they do from any notices that they show, any support they stop. Kevin: Do you think so? I mean, the numbers I’ve seen most recently suggest that on the Open Web, Internet Explorer, overall, is still in the neighborhood of 60% at worst and that IE 6 is dwindling but still representing about half of that. So, if 30% of your browser numbers on a bad day are Internet Explorer 6, that’s a major group to decide to start ignoring. I think if there were no technical reason not to support Internet Explorer 6, I think they’d continue supporting Internet Explorer 6 for many years to come but the combination of the fact that there are newer, better choices and that those newer, better choices enable the developers of these sites to build better features that run faster and provide a superior user experience, that magic combination is what’s getting sites like YouTube over the line. Brad: What they should do is these features that won’t be supporting an IE 6, they should have just a screenshot of what this feature is and how cool it is and say look at what you could be doing if you upgraded your browser. Patrick: I mean, we’ve discussed this, some of it, is that people are locked into it. I mean, maybe if they complain enough to their administrator or to whoever controls it, it will be changed but at the end of the day, a lot of people are locked into it that’s why you’d prefer not to lock them out totally. Kevin: What I found interesting is that YouTube isn’t – because YouTube, of course, is a Google company. They aren’t saying get rid of Internet Explorer, try Google Chrome. They do have an add in their sidebar for Google Chrome if you’re not running it, but this phasing out IE 6 bar offers three choices and the first one is Internet Explorer 8, the second is Firefox 3.5, and the last one in the bar is Google Chrome. So, they’re continuing this trend of not being too picky about which browser you choose as long it’s a modern one. I’m sure Opera is disappointed they didn’t make it into that bar. Stephan: I think it’s respectable, though, of them to do that. There’s other browsers besides ours and we know ours still has bugs and Chrome is not the greatest thing, it might still have some problems. Patrick: I don’t know if they’re saying that exactly but… Stephan: Well, they may not be saying that. Yeah. Patrick: I think it may be as a PR thing as much as anything else because they’re looking up at both IE and Firefox to throw them out there, brands they already know, but you notice Chrome is listed first, so. Kevin: I was at a meeting of the Melbourne Web Standards Group just the other night and John Allsopp, who’s one of the masterminds behind the Web Directions conference series, he was speaking about parts of CSS3 that you can use today and he took a moment to touch on this YouTube phasing out IE 6. His theory is that the corporates, the places that are always going to be the last to upgrade their browser, are going to see this is a feature and not a problem. They’re going to go “Wow! Our chosen browser now prevents our employees from browsing YouTube at work.” Patrick: Win. Kevin: Win, exactly. So yeah, this may not get everyone over the line. Patrick: “Can Facebook do this, too?” Kevin: Well, I wish, I wish. I’m sure they wish too. Our next story today is about Microsoft Azure which we talked about some time ago. This is Microsoft’s cloud computing, cloud web hosting environment where rather than having to buy a dedicated box at a hosting company, you pay for computing time on Microsoft’s servers and host your ASP.NET web site there. I say ASP.NET, but really, anything that’s hosted on the Windows platform will run nicely in Azure as a general statement, but the news today is that Microsoft has finally announced pricing and availability. Right, Brad? Brad: Yeah. Azure is going to be commercially available in mid-November and Microsoft’s supposed to announce a launch at their Professional Developers Conference which happens in November, but it’s actually in a beta now and developers had been working with it for a while underneath Microsoft’s Community Technology Preview. So, it’s been around since shortly after we announced it back – whenever it was back when they’re first talking about Azure, but they’re just now getting to where it’s going to start costing money. So, Azure is essentially free up until November when it goes live and at that point, Microsoft has released their pricing structure for the service as well. Kevin: Have you guys heard anything, users talking about Azure? Like, I’ve heard the Microsoft line but do you guys know anyone that’s hosting anything on Azure or that’s even playing with it? Brad: I haven’t, no, and it’s surprising because I think Microsoft needs to be in the cloud and there’s definitely a big demand for the .NET services to be a little more accessible and easier to work with and also not break the bank because right now, licensing Microsoft technology is expensive and it’s very hard for smaller companies to, say, get a SQL Server license to set up a physical server at their office or wherever it may be. So, this cloud hosting is really going to open the door, I think, for more developers to kind of get in to the .NET because it’s going to be much cheaper and more inexpensive for them to launch their apps. But you’re right, the discussion really isn’t there like some of the other services. Kevin: It’s been eerily quite from my point of view. I don’t know if I just don’t fly in those circles. I don’t know a lot of .NET developers, I’ll be honest. It seems to me that Azure as a strategy, it’s very different from what their core developer group would be working on. I would hazard to guess to say that more ASP.NET developers are working in corporate environments than, say, PHP developers. People working in those environments, they develop for their customer’s servers, their company’s servers that site either behind the firewall or in a data center that is paid for by that corporate. The idea of moving corporate resources into cloud hosted environment is perhaps a harder sell than the traditional model of investing in server infrastructure every few years and keeping that up to date. I think that the freelancers out there and the small businesses will be or have been quicker to adopt the benefits of cloud computing, and as a result, you haven’t seen a lot of .NET developers embracing Azure the way we’ve seen open source developers embracing something like Amazon EC2 hosting. So, maybe Azure as a strategy for Microsoft is a way of trying to get a new segment of audience looking at their technologies. Brad: You’re right. It’s going to hit that small business kind of middle ground at the pricing and I think a lot of these corporations, corporate environments like you talked about, you’re right, they are kind of stuck in the “you have to have hardware…,” “you have to maintain your hardware…,” “you have to have your own licensing setup on your own servers.” But I think, especially with the economy how it is, people are really going to start looking at Azure because ultimately, it’s probably going to be cost saving for a lot of these corporations no matter how big they are because it’s going to be much cheaper than maintaining their own equipment and it’s easily expandable, whereas when you’re working with hardware, adding in a new group of servers can take quite a bit of work. Kevin: Speaking of pricing, Azure is looking pretty competitive with things like Amazon EC2. For their web hosting pricing, they’ve announced that to run a virtual server in Azure is going to cost $0.12 an hour and storage is going to be $0.15 per gigabyte per month. So, if you have 1 gigabyte of data sitting there running on one server, it’s going to cost you $0.12 an hour and then $0.15 for that gigabyte for that month, which is pretty comparable. Amazon EC2’s pricing, they’re talking $0.10 an hour for their normal sized virtual server but if you need high CPU speed, it will cost you $0.20 an hour, if you need fast disk access, which we find is a big benefit for our database servers, that is $0.40 an hour. So, Amazon has this range. I’d like to see some comparisons of how Azure performs so we could have a closer match between Azure’s offering and Amazon’s pricing, but yeah, it’s in the same ballpark and storage on Amazon S3 is also $0.15 per gigabyte per month out of the gate but the more data you store in S3 the cheaper it gets. So, very large data sets, they only charge $0.10 per gigabyte. So, it does get cheaper with volume. Azure is clearly not going to try to undercut the pricing in the market but I supposed Microsoft’s argument would be that the Azure environment provides a much richer one. You have a lot more built-in functionality on Windows server environment than you do with Amazon EC2 where you basically have an empty computer and you have to install your operating system in it or pick one of their operating system options and then install all of your software on to it. It’s really a barebones environment on Amazon EC2, whereas Azure, it’s a bit richer because you have that Microsoft software platform going for you. But if any of our listeners have played with Azure, do get in touch. Our next story – and I’m sad to say it, gentle listener – is DiggBar again. I was really hoping we wouldn’t hear from DiggBar again. Patrick, what’s the news? Patrick: What happened early this week or the end of last week was that Digg switched the performance of the Digg URL shortening system. Now, after the initial hubbub with the DiggBar, what they did was they left it on only for logged in Digg users who had it switched on but if it was not a logged in user, then they were redirected right to the page directly. Now, the change that they made again this week was that they switched it so that the shortened URL would go to this URL’s page on Digg. So, you know, you have your Digg URL where they have Digg comments, the number of Diggs, et cetera, and that’s the page it would take you to rather than the direct URL. Kevin: So, it’s not even the DiggBar anymore. It’s just a shortcut to the Digg page. Patrick: Right, except for logged in users. They would still get the DiggBar if they had it on. Kevin Rose came back from a two-week vacation and he said, basically, he didn’t know that they had done this. He wasn’t aware that it had changed. Kevin: He’s changed his story a bit on this. At first he said, “I didn’t know this was happening,” and then he said, “I knew it was happening but I didn’t know it was happening now.” The message has changed a little bit I think. Patrick: Right. Yeah, he definitely. In an interview with Leo Laporte, actually, he said that this is something that they had been planning. Rather than having a short URL service, they wanted to use their short URLs to redirect the Digg stories similar to how a lot of blogs like TechCrunch are doing now where they have their own short URLs. Long story short, Digg posted a blog entry on July 21st and they adjusted it again so that any short URLs created as of that day, July 31st, will go directly to their page, direct to the direct URL, but from this point forward, short URLs that have a page on Digg will be sent to the Digg page. Kevin: My thought on this, is this completely changes the nature of the DiggBar. It’s not a URL shortening service anymore. All our complaints about the DiggBar up until now have been on the basis that they were advertising themselves as a URL shortening service. The fact that they’re not doing that anymore in some senses removes the complaint but it also makes it a useless service to me. Brad: Yeah, I’d agree. It’s no longer a URL shortener. It just redirects right to Digg. I mean, I get it from a Digg standpoint but you’re right, it kind of seems useless to me and I would expect the usage of the DiggBar to really drop off over time. Kevin: If I was a heavy Digg user and I saw a DiggBar URL distributed by Twitter, I suppose I would be happy knowing that when I click on that, I would see the site with a DiggBar at the top rather than the Digg page that I would then have to click through. So, it’s a convenience for Digg users but Digg users aren’t the Web and if Digg users continue trying to distribute these URLs, they’re just going to annoy everyone who isn’t a Digg user. Patrick: I almost think that they should have done this from the very beginning and we can’t forget that the whole Digg URL shortening thing was originally to help generate traffic to Digg through the DiggBar. Complaints came, they changed it, and then they made it a URL shortening service but in the end, using these short URLs as a means to point to the Digg page that have usually this very long URLs with a title of the Digg entry in it is a good idea for Digg. If they had done that from the start, then obviously, it wouldn’t had two rounds of complaints, but at the end of the day, the value for Digg, is it in being a URL shortener or is it in offering short URLs to Digg. I guess there’s an argument on both sides there but it makes sense for them to do this from the start, but of course, now, it has its baggage attached to it. Kevin: Yeah. They fell into a trap they created from themselves. I think they had this service in mind and then they saw that URL shorteners were popular and they went, “Okay, we’ll market our service as a URL shortener,” even though what they wanted to build wasn’t a URL shortener and they got into all this trouble over the fact that they wanted to call it that and they were forced to make it a URL shortener and they ended up with something that they didn’t actually want to build in the first place. So, they’ve clearly gone back the other way. Good for them for sticking to their guns and building what they actually wanted to build, whether anyone actually wants to use it, remains to be seen. We’ve got a couple of stories that we’ve spoken about before just like the DiggBar that I thought we should check in with. Web fonts, we’ve spoken about a couple of times before and web fonts are coming to a head. We’ve got the TypeKit service which is set to launch in the next few weeks, I’m told, and it’s set to change everything by enabling web designers to use commercial fonts on the web with a proper licensing model. At the same time, there are still plenty of people who think that we’ll get even more fonts if we can come up with a file format that browsers will support that includes information in the font file describing the license under which that font is made available on that web site. We’ve heard repeatedly that the stumbling block here is the font foundries, the big companies making fonts by the dozen and making their fortunes by selling them to poor designers and that these font foundries have not wanted to release their fonts unless they can have some reassurance that they won’t be distributed illegally without designers paying for them. But the stories that we’re seeing this week suggest that these big font foundries are aren’t that big. In fact, most font foundries are actually just one person, a designer building fonts for the love of it and hoping to sell that font for a fair price when it’s used. The problem is that these little font foundries, it turns out, aren’t in a position to dictate things like file formats for the Web and that’s been the impasse that we’ve had for the last 10 years. All of the web designers got together recently to discuss the situation at TypeCon, a conference for typographically-minded people and they spent a lot of time discussing the state of web fonts and it looks like we’ve got two avenues where things are going, TypeKit and services like it. We’ve seen two or three other competing services announced in the past couple of weeks and this file format, .webfont is what it’s looking like it’s going to be called and there have been a couple of proposals and the most recent one is actually looking fairly reasonable. We’ll link to this in the show notes but Tal Leming has posted the latest proposal for a web font file and guys, tell me if this make sense to you. The web font file will actually just be a zip file containing two files: one, is a TrueType font file or OpenType font file, the same ones that you can install in Windows and using in whatever design programs or word processors you want, and the second file is just a plain text XML file that says this is where this font came from and this is who it’s licensed to, to run on these web sites, and that’s it. Brad: I think it’s great. I mean, I’m a fan of anything that uses XML. So, if it uses XML, I usually like it. I think this kind of fixes the issue of people being afraid to release their fonts and not being associated on the right license or who has the license. I guess the question is what would prevent someone from just modifying the XML file with their own information? Kevin: Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Even worse, you take a .webfont file, you rename it to .zip file, you extract it, and one of the two files will just be called fontdata. You rename that to a fontdata.ttf or fontdata.otf and you’ve got a font file that you can use wherever you want on any computer, any design program. It seems clear that the people talking about this proposal, they don’t want DRM. They don’t believe that putting some sort of copy protection around their font data is the right move and I think that’s great that they’ve realized that, but you’re right, they’re leaving the door wide open. They are just going to distribute these fonts in a format that the format itself says it’s not meant to be used illegally but it’s not going to do anything to stop you if you know what you’re doing. It’s the compromise I would’ve hoped for. I supposed it just seems a little too good to be true. Are these font designers really going to go for this? Brad: It goes back to pirated software in general. I mean, if somebody wants to hack that file or to get to that data, whatever it may be, whether it’s a font file or mp3, whatever, even if it’s DRM, they’re going to get it. They’re going to hack it. They’re going to be able to take off any kind of encryption or DRM that they need to. So, basically, by doing something like this, you’re going to block the majority of the people that aren’t that technical, don’t know how to do stuff like that. They’re not going to know I can just go into this XML file and change it. The people that are technical enough to do that, they’re going to do it anyways regardless of what you do. So, I think this is definitely a good first step. You know, it’s definitely a step in the right direction. Patrick: You’re talking about web designers though. I mean, we’d hope they can edit an XML file. I mean, I could do that and I’m not a programmer. Brad: You would think, but that doesn’t mean that everybody can. Stephan: Give it like two months after it’s out and you’ll have like some kind of scraper out there that they scrapes the internet for these things and people will have all the fonts in a repository. Let’s just call what it is. That’s what’s going to happen. Kevin: If you know what you’re doing right now though, any commercial web font or any commercial font, you can download it. There are sites out there with pirated software on them and fonts are very commonly featured in those libraries of pirated software. So, already, these fonts are out there I would say and they want to make sure that people know what they’re doing when they are pirating fonts. The big difference about this proposal is it’s not coming from the browser makers, it’s not coming from the web developers, it’s actually coming from people who make fonts. Bert Bos, one of the creators of CSS who now works at the W3C was quoted in saying, “The big difference with this proposal is, it is: (a) proposed by people who make fonts, and (b) proposed in a language that programmers who make browsers can understand. It’s the first proposal that is crossing the chasm that exists between the people who make the fonts and the people who consume the fonts and it’s great. That’s why it has the best chance yet of seeing adoption and I hope it does. Kevin: Let’s move on. Our second story that I wanted to check in with is HTML 5 and I mentioned John Allsopp’s name earlier. This story began with a comment by John Allsopp on Jeffrey Zeldman’s blog and John contends that HTML 5 is a mess. He argues that for the first time, focus is on fixing the problems in HTML and what he saw was a disturbing trend in the HTML 5 working group. People have started thinking in that group that we don’t have to get HTML 5 exactly right. If in the future it shows that we got some things wrong, we can fix HTML again then, but John is saying this is the first time in a decade that we’ve had focused support on improving HTML and if we don’t get it right now, we may not have a chance again. The words he uses that this is the last chance for a generation to get HTML right and if we don’t do it now, we may never get that chance. Brad: Ian’s comment when he mentioned when the future comes we can just fix HTML. I think it definitely sounds a little worst than what it is and it’s probably not what he meant but I think it raises a good point. The Web’s evolving and it’s always going to evolve and I don’t think that it’s ever going to stop. So, kind of coming at it with the attitude of we’re going to make one HTML spec that’s going to last forever even a generation. I mean obviously, HTML 4 is 10 years old but HTML 5 doesn’t have to last 10 years. It could last two years, it could last five years. It’s hard to say. We don’t know what the Web is going to be in five years from now or 10 years. We can take educated guesses but trying to predict where the Web’s at now, 10 years ago, we would have been way off. So, I think it’s always going to have to be tweaked. It’s always going to have, you know, new versions are always going to have to be created. So, let’s get something that’s much better than what we have now and then move forward and when it comes time to upgrade that to a new spec, then, that’s what should happen. Stephan: It’s never going to be static. It’s never going to just stop being what it is. There’s always going to be someone working on a new feature or a new tag or something. So, I don’t understand that argument. Maybe he’s just saying that we can fix it later because, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m kind of lost. Patrick: Join the club. Kevin: I think everyone’s lost in HTML at the moment. It is a mess as John says and both Bruce Lawson and Jeffrey Zeldman have weighed in following John’s epic comment—and I say “epic” because it’s actually quite long—but the point they both seem to agree on, is that, yes, HTML is a mess but maybe that’s not a bad thing. We spoke in our last episode about the XHTML 2 effort getting cancelled and they’re saying the reason XHTML 2 died a premature death was because it was too clean. It wasn’t enough of a mess. It represented this idealistic, utopian view of what the Web could be if it had been conceived from scratch to be this clean, perfect environment where there were no coding mistakes and where the Web was designed from the very beginning to be what we need today right now and that no one would ever actually be able to use or implement that spec because, as you say, the Web is a moving target. Bruce Lawson’s blog, he said that there’s three kinds of mess in play right now. The fact that HTML 5 is a mess because it’s built on a mess that is HTML 4. If we didn’t build on top of that mess, if we just started from scratch, we just end up with XHTML 2 again. So, we need to embrace backwards compatibility and live with that mess that we get as a result. He’s saying that the process for building HTML 5 is a mess because it’s the first time that the W3C has developed a spec in the open where absolutely anyone could sign on to the working group and have their say and that obviously, that’s going to create a lot of shouting matches and that is a mess, but it’s a good mess because the web is being developed out in the open. And finally, that the spec itself is a mess and it seems to be that this is the main point that John was worried about, that the HTML 5 spec that’s being developed has some ambiguities in it and seemingly arbitrary rules that may have made sense to the person who wrote the spec at the time but it doesn’t make sense to the reader. John argues, for example, that a header element should be able to contain navigation because the top of your page, the header, generally, is where you put your site-wide navigation and so depending on what you think a header means, it may be perfectly natural to want to put navigation in there, and yet, the HTML 5 spec as it exists now doesn’t let you do that. And what Bruce Lawson says the solution to that particular mess is, is join the working group or email your thoughts to the working group so that you have your say. It’s wide open and if people voice their complaints, the rules of the working group say that those complaints have to be answered and paid attention to. So, it’s a mess but maybe it’s a good mess. Patrick: Well, you know what Einstein said about mess. “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, what’s an empty desk a sign of?” Kevin: Exactly. The last story we’re going to cover in the show today is search marketing. Stephan? Stephan: Yeah. So, I was doing some research and I found this interesting article on SearchEngineWatch.com and it talks about the search spend amount is being projected to grow despite people being fearful that they’re not going to get the return for their money, and some of the figures they throw out is that money spent on search marketing is supposed to explode to $17 billion in 2010 from $15 billion, but the return, the people that they asked, their confidence level in, they said that they were not confident in returns at all. So, I think it’s interesting that they’re willing to spend more money for search ads and things but they’re not confident that they’re to get anything from it. So, it’s like a black hole that I kind of want in on. Patrick: And there’s another way to look at this data as well. This is done by Forrester Research and it also has fields for online display advertising, email marketing, social media marketing, and mobile marketing, and if you run content web sites like myself or like SitePoint is a content web site, and you have advertising, online display advertising is projected to double, more than double over the next five years. Email marketing is going to go up not as much social media marketing, they say, or triple or quadruple even. So, it’s interesting information. We’ll see if it happens but if it does, then those of us who do web sites that sell advertising, hopefully, will benefit from this windfall, right? Kevin: Colour me a skeptic but it looks to me like this SearchEngineWatch story is trying to take two different pieces of research and combine them and make the people involved look like idiots. The story here is that people who don’t believe search marketing is going to give them much return, are planning on investing more money than ever in it, and on the surface, like you said, Stephan, if that’s the truth, these people have no brains. They’re doing something that clearly makes no sense but these two pieces of data are from two entirely different surveys and the first one that says that they’re going to spend more money on search marketing, it specifically calls it search marketing, and to me, that means buying paid ads in search engines, that sort of thing, Google AdWords. Whereas, the other survey that talks about what level of confidence they have in return, calls it search engine marketing or SEM, which to me is a buzzword I’ve seen more often associated with optimizing your web site so that it has a higher placement in Google and also doing investment into things like dynamic landing pages so that a traffic that comes from search engines like Google, when they land at your site, they’re given some guidance that’s directly related to the search terms that they typed in to find your site. So, are we really talking about two different things here? Maybe they’re giving up on search engine optimization on their site and planning just to spend more money buying that traffic with Google AdWords. Stephan: Well, and if you look at that way, the second set of numbers has a chart associated with it as well with statistics that say that there will be no change in search engine marketing for 31% of those polled, the amount spent, but then that 20% or more, they’ll have an increase. That number was 13% of the people that responded said that they would spend 20% more on search engine using the same verbiage there. So, if you ignore the first chart and ignore that actual numbers, I think that’s more relevant to what we’re talking about. Kevin: There are still a lot of people planning, you know, 60% plus planning to spend more money on search engine marketing whatever that means to them. Patrick: There are 65.4 exactly to spend the same or more. Thank you, calculator. Kevin: Thank you, Patrick. Brad: It’s also asking the question of expected performance which I think in any industry right now, if you said what do you expect next year out of your business, most people are probably going to say, “Well, I won’t be as good with the economy.” I think most people, the glass is half empty right now, so the outlook in the next year to it probably isn’t the best. Kevin: So, they’re expecting it to perform worst but they feel like if they didn’t spend more money, it would perform even worst than that. Brad: Even worst. Stephan: There’s the survey question! Kevin: Wow, that’s a gloomy outlook. Well, let’s dispel the gloom here a bit and shine a little light on our host spotlights for the week to close off the show here. Patrick, what have you got for us? Patrick: Common Craft released a new video just today actually, July 21st, called “Insurance in Plain English” and it’s in the usual Common Craft style, “paperworks format” is what they call it and it’s an interesting look at insurance in general and how it works and that’s kind of a business issue as well but which is the cool video and talks about insurance in a fun, light way that I think you can definitely benefit from personally and professionally. Kevin: Can you buy insurance in case your search engine marketing doesn’t perform well? Patrick: I don’t know. Are you looking for funding? Kevin: That might be a business idea. Brad, what have you got? Brad: I have a fun little site. This past Monday, everyone celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Moon Landing which was a pretty historic event all across the world and kind of under the same light, NASA’s launched a new web site where you can submit your name, your country, and your zip code and it will—everyone’s name that are submitted are going to be place on a microchip on the next Mars Rover that’s headed to Mars of course and will be sending it up in 2011, so a couple years from now. But you can visit the site and send your name to Mars. Kevin: Cool. Stephan, what do you got? Stephan: I was reading this article by Alex Payne of Twitter and the web site is al3x.net, he talks about Fever, the new feed reader from Shaun Inman, and the future of feed readers in general and it’s a really interesting article and it’s something I struggle with getting rid of the clutter in my feed reader and reading things that are really interesting to me and things that aren’t interesting to me, getting rid of them. So, it’s a good article. I suggest people go read it. Kevin: The theory of this Fever feed reader, unlike other feed readers, the more feeds you subscribe to, the better information you get rather than more noise because it picks out common URLs that appear in multiple feeds and assumes that they’re going to be more important to you and so it floats them to the top. That’s pretty exciting to me. The big difference with this particular Fever application is it’s a PHP app that you buy and then install on your own server to use. So, it’s a little different and I think that may keep it from breaking into the mainstream but certainly, geeks like us can certainly setup something like that. Is that pretty much the gist of the article, Stephan, or is talking about something else? Stephan: Well, it goes in the aggregators and talks about Google Reader and how simple Google Reader used to be and how kind of the readers have all gone in different way. NetNewsWire is kind of focused on the commercial and the things and you’ve got Bloglines which has kind of died, I guess. It’s kind of not being developed on anymore. NewsGator is enterprise. So, it talks about all these different aggregators and things where you have all your feeds and really what’s important to you is actually getting read and what’s not important to you is not getting read and this getting junked and thrown away. I mean, that thing is a problem for all of us, right, is getting rid of the noise and so he talks about what the future is, what can really be done and he’s kind of critical to Google Reader and the new social features that they put in and how they’re poorly conceived. Kevin: My host spotlight this week has to do a bit with the Twitter attacks that we’ve seen. It’s no secret that Twitter has been struggling with security lately. We had a story that apparently one of the servers related to the Twitter search site, the password for that server was “password” and so, they’ve been doing a bit of talking about password security and how to choose a good password. But security goes beyond choosing one good password. The big attack that we saw that TechCrunch got riled up in and they got drawn into it when the attacker sent them a whole bunch of confidential documents from Twitter’s internal company meetings and things like that. There’s this story that came out this week on TechCrunch again describing exactly how that attack took place and the short version is that the attacker found the Gmail address of someone who works at Twitter and used the password reset feature on Gmail to send that password for that account to a backup email address. When you sign up to Google, you can give them a backup email address so that if you get locked out of your Gmail account you can have your password sent to the secondary account and when Gmail does this, it says, “We have sent your password to *****@***** but it puts a few letters in place of those stars. So, you can get an idea of which of your possibly many email addresses it’s gone to. The attacker saw that Gmail had sent the password to a Hotmail address. So, he went and guessed what that Hotmail address might be and found out that Hotmail had shut down that account due to inactivity. So, what he did was recreate that account for himself, resubmit the Gmail password recovery form, and got the password. He then logged in to this Gmail account and that’s bad enough, but of course, to do that, he had to change the password and doing that, he would have alerted the owner of the account. So, what he did was search in the Gmail account to find other password notice emails and found that they all used pretty much the same password. So, he just reset the Gmail account back to that and that’s how he got in without being noticed. The problem here is that the user of that account was using the same password everywhere and that’s something that a lot of web users, maybe yourself, listener, does routinely. Patrick: No. Not our listeners. Kevin: So, the long way around to getting to my spotlight this week is I’ve got a couple of utilities that help you to have a separate password for every web site you use. If you’re on the Mac, you have definitely got to get 1Password. This is a product from Agile Web Solutions. It’s relatively cheap. It integrates with all of your browsers and it will also sync to things like the iPhone, and in an upcoming version, this is kind of a hidden feature at the moment but they’re going to expose this in the next version, if you decide to store your encrypted passwords on the web or in a service like Dropbox, you can, from any web browser anywhere, get into your stored passwords with your one password through a web interface, through any web browser. So, you can access your passwords from anywhere using your master password and one password has a lot of other convenience features. The one I like the best that I rarely see mentioned in their marketing is sort of this global keyword shortcut you can use in your browser and it pops up a search box that you can type the first couple of letters of the site that you have a password for, that you want to log into. So, for example I use it for my online banking, I type the first few letters of my bank’s name and press enter and it opens a new tab, opens the login page from my bank, fills in my details, submits it all automatically and suddenly I’m looking at my bank information and it’s really useful. If you’re not on the Mac or if you want like a free solution, there are several I know. Patrick, do you use KeePass on Windows? Patrick: Yeah, it’s a free piece of software. I used it for a long time. It works well. I believe its open source even. So, it’s a very nice script and actually found out about that through the Lifehacker on the Lifehacker book. Kevin: There you go. For Firefox users, there’s a couple of add-ons that will work on any platform with Firefox and the nice thing about these add-ons is that rather than generating passwords that you may not then have accessed to on another computer, what they do is they take your master password, combine it with the domain name of the site that you’re visiting, and do some encryption magic and produce a unique password for that site, and so you can go to any other Firefox machine and use this extension to regenerate those passwords using your master password. You don’t have to share the actual data between machines in anyway and there’s PwdHash from Stanford I believe and Magic Password Generator. These are the two Firefox add-ons and we’ll have links to all of those in the show notes. So, that is my long protracted host spotlight this week which brings our show to an end. Visit us sitepoint.com/podcast to leave comments on this show and subscribe to receive every show automatically either through iTunes or by signing up to our feed directly. Email podcast@sitepoint.com if you have questions for us to discuss on next week’s show. Let’s go around the table guys. Brad: I’m Brad Williams from WebDevStudios.com and you can find on Twitter @williamsba. Patrick: I’m Patrick O’Keefe for the iFroggy Network. I’m on Twitter @iFroggy. Stephan: And I’m Stephan Segraves. You can find me on Twitter @ssegraves. Kevin: The SitePoint podcast is produced by Carl Longnecker and I’m Kevin Yank. Be sure to tune in next week. You won’t have to wait two weeks for the next episode; we’re going to have a special episode next week, an interview with Jon Hicks, the designer behind the new user interface of Opera. Be sure to check your feed this time next week for that special show. Talk to you then. Bye-bye.