Episode 69 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week your hosts are Patrick O’Keefe (@iFroggy), Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves), and Brad Williams (@williamsba).
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- SitePoint Podcast #69: Let’s Move to Finland (MP3, 35MB, 36:25)
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Episode Summary
Here are the topics covered in this episode:
- Firefox 4.0 beta 1 is out
- 1 Mbps a Legal Right in Finland
- What it takes to be a top 100 website
- .xxx: The Internet’s Pornography Domain
- StatCounter: Chrome Now Bigger Than Safari In The US, Too
Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/69.
Host Spotlights
- Stephan: Camelopards
- Brad: 10 Best Google Chrome Extensions for Webmasters
- Patrick: CÎROC Vodka
Show Transcript
Patrick: July 9th, 2010: Chrome takes the third spot; you’ll soon be able to register your own .xxx domain name; and what it takes to become a top 100 website … this is the SitePoint Podcast Number 69: Let’s Move to Finland.
Patrick: Hello and welcome to episode #69 of the SitePoint podcast. This is Patrick O’Keefe and I am filling in today for our usual lead co-host, Kevin Yank, who is off doing better things, I’m sure. I’m joined by Stephan Segraves and Brad Williams.
How’s it going guys?
Brad: Great, real good.
Stephan: Going well.
Patrick: As we often talk about on the show it’s time to discuss browsers. Our first two stories are about Chrome and Firefox — good news for both. The first story comes from TechCrunch: Robin Wauters at TechCrunch reports that according to statcounter.com, a service I myself use on my sites, Chrome is now more widely used than Safari in the U.S. taking a solid claim over the third spot in the browser market share list following, of course, Firefox and IE. According to Statcounter, Chrome’s market share from June 21st to 27th is 8.97 percent which is ahead of Safari at 8.8 percent, so maybe not a solid grasp but it’s a lead anyway. I myself have still not downloaded Chrome so I can help their market share at any time, right?
Brad: We’re waiting for you Patrick. It’s inevitable, you might as well do it.
Patrick: You use Chrome, right, Brad?
Brad: I do, yeah, I love Chrome. I’m a Firefox convert, in fact, I still like Firefox, it’s not like I have anything against it. For me it was just the speed, I mean Chrome was, hands down, the fastest browser, even back on version one in my opinion. So that was what really pulled me over, but I still use Firefox for certain features like Firebug, and some of the add-ons they haven’t quite ported it over to Chrome yet. But, yeah, I’m pretty much an exclusive Chrome user as far as my day to day internet surfing.
Patrick: We talked about Chrome before on the show and how maybe market share isn’t Google’s end-all, be-all objective here, maybe there are other things that they’re looking to do with Chrome or to push other browser makers. So it’s interesting to see them continually climb. Net Applications which is another widely cited browser market share site has them at 7.04 percent which is lower than StatCounter but Safari is much lower on Net Applications at 4.77 percent. So the two services differ number-wise, but either way Chrome is third place.
Brad: I think this is really exciting news especially for Google because Chrome’s been around for less than two years; it’s fairly new as far as browsers are concerned, and it’s now ahead of a browser that ships on, what, the second most popular operating system at least in the U.S. I would say, and it’s now surpassed that. So it’s very impressive, I’m sure the Chrome team is extremely happy about that whether they want to admit that market share is or is not the important factor, ultimately I’m sure it’s an important factor, they just may not come out and say it, so it’s amazing in just two short years that they’ve already become number three in the U.S. And I think they’ve been three overall worldwide for a little while, I might be mistaken on that, but I thought I read that somewhere, but it’s pretty impressive.
Patrick: Yeah, speaking of operating systems, I just pulled up the StatCounter stats for that as well and Mac 0S X is 12.33 percent, and you compare that to the Safari browser which I said is 8.88 percent, so I guess I mean there are some Safari users on Windows of course, but I guess the vast majority would be on the Mac, and in that category they’re losing maybe four percent versus people who install the OS. You’re on Mac, right, Stephan?
Stephan: Yep.
Patrick: And you don’t use Safari or do you?
Stephan: I use a mix of Safari and Chrome. Actually I use Firefox too, but –
Patrick: You muddy the waters, okay.
Stephan: I muddy the waters, yeah. And I use Safari on Windows too, so …
Patrick: Right, well, you’re one of those I just mentioned, yep, one of those.
Stephan: Keep on muddying them up, yeah.
Brad: I actually went on StatCounter and pulled up some stats because I was curious to see if Chrome’s growing, which it obviously is, I was curious to see if I could determine what browser its pulling the most from. And obviously it’s probably an impossible stat to determine, but I looked at the same week period a year ago, because I wanted to see where Internet Explorer and Firefox were at, so Internet Explorer, same time for them last year, basically the last full week in June, they were at 55.97 percent, so about 56 percent of the market share, and this share they’re at 52 percent. And Firefox actually dipped too because last year at the same time, the last full week in June, they were at just over 31 percent and now they’re at 28 ½ percent. So you’ve got to believe that Chrome is kind of pulling at least a few percent from every — all the major browsers out there as people are converting over, which is interesting. I wasn’t sure if Firefox would be up or down, it was actually down.
Patrick: How does Opera compare?
Brad: I don’t even think it was on the graph. I’m not sure if you can add that in there, but I’m assuming it’s going to be kind of low.
Patrick: Fight little Opera, fight.
Brad: No offense to Opera users.
Patrick: Well, speaking of, again, browsers, Firefox released version 4.0 Beta 1 on July 6th — this is from a story at ZDNet by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes. He has a list of features that are different in 4.0, among them just scanning here tabs are now on top by default on Windows only. I’ve read another story about this; you have the option to change the tab layout. There’s different aesthetic changes; I myself have not downloaded this yet, have either of you?
Brad: No, in fact, for those of you that don’t know we actually record the podcast on Tuesday, so this browser actually just came out just a few minutes ago from the recording of this show.
Patrick: Today is July 6th, so.
Brad: Yeah, today is July 6th, so no we haven’t had a chance to download it. But just doing a quick few searches on Twitter just to see what the overall general opinion is, and honestly it sounds like people aren’t, at least what I’m seeing, it sounds like some people aren’t that impressed. I guess when you think of a new version like three or four or five you expect it to be this like groundbreaking change, and when it comes to just a few UI changes and a lot of kind of behind the scenes stuff, even more-so behind the scenes stuff, I think a lot of times that can lead to disappointment. Obviously it’s Beta one so it’s going to be buggy; there’s going to be things that aren’t done or pieces of UI that aren’t completed, but at least the initial reaction just in the few minutes that it’s been released — that’s some of the things I was reading.
Patrick: Yeah, speaking of some of those UI changes I’m just scanning this list again, things like the Stop and Reload button are now merged into a single button, I mentioned the tabs, the bookmarks, toolbars have been replaced by a Bookmarks button. There is I guess better crash protection when there is a crash of Adobe Flash or Apple QuickTime or Microsoft Silverlight. There are some technical changes that maybe the average web surfer may not notice or care all that much about, native support for HD, HTML 5 WebM video format; I have a feeling we’ve discussed that on an episode not that long ago, and experimental direct 2D rendering back end is available on Windows, there’s just kind of some techie stuff in there.
What do you guys think about the tabs, moving the tabs to the top? It seems like this is an issue that some people really care about so much so that they had to come out and kind of say that, hey, this is just an option — this is the default but you can definitely change it.
Brad: I mean I think it makes sense to have them on top. I feel like that’s kind of — I guess I’m just used to seeing them on top in all the other browsers and other applications and programs. I guess I didn’t realize they were at the bottom by default because my version they’ve always been at the top. I don’t know if it’s just carrying over my settings that I set a long time ago, that must be what it is. But I’ve always felt that tabs deserve to be at the top. Even like my IRC client by default they put tabs like on the left side and I instantly went in there to changed them to be at the top because to me it just feels right, I don’t know why.
Patrick: Is that a config change? Do you have to go to the browser configuration to change that yourself because I don’t really see an option in the current Firefox to move the tabs?
Brad: From what I’m reading it sounds like it is. But, yeah, like I said, I haven’t seen it either and it might have always been at the top, but of course I’ve just been upgrading through the last few versions so I would imagine a fresh install they would not be.
Patrick: Yeah so, I mean, I’m used to Firefox and really IE more than that, and I’ve never had tabs at the tops and I don’t really bother that much with other browsers, so I’m just not really used to that. At the same time though I watched the video, I should find it and include it in the show links, but of the person at Mozilla explaining why and how it works and visually why it’s important to have it all contained in the tab so that what you’re looking at everything is on the bar, including the search bar, including the address bar is all contained in that tab since it’s all related to the page you’re viewing, and then have it be able to switch to another tab, and then the search box, the address bar, etc, is all independent and contained below that tab. Visually it makes sense but, of course, people have to get used to something that’s new, too, to them.
Brad: Looks like there’s a new domain that will be coming out soon and that would be the xxx domain — .xxx, and some of you might be familiar with this because back in 2005 there was actually initial approval to support the .xxx domain which after back and forth with some conservative groups they decided to hold off on that. But now it’s moving forward, ICANN which is the International Corporation for Sign Names and Numbers, which is basically the corporation that oversees domain names, has actually voted and approved the .xxx domain extension. So it looks like it’s going to go through, barring any unforeseen legal action or anything like that. But it’s interesting.
What do you guys think, I mean .xxx, is that actually going to help put porn into the one spot? Is it going to make no difference at all? What are your thoughts?
Stephan: So does porn now not — when this goes through do you think porn will no longer be in dot coms?
Brad: No, that’s not the case, it’s completely voluntary. Now there’s been a lot of adult sites that have stepped up and said they will support this and they will switch their site over once .xxx comes out. But no, it’s voluntary so it’s completely based on whether they want to do it or not.
Stephan: If it was completely forced upon them I would say it’d be awesome for businesses, right? Because then corporations could just block the .xxx and move along.
Patrick: And they’d probably say can we move Facebook to xxx (laughs)?
Stephan: Yeah, that too. I think it’s kind of a good idea, kind of you know what you’re getting into if you go to a .xxx domain then. It’s not like whitehouse.com and all of a sudden, you know what I mean, you’re not going to mistakenly type something in. Because I’ve seen these cases, people have sent me links to things where it’s like a fake domain that is like the common misspelling of another domain and it’s porn.
Brad: Yeah, that was a big issue back in the mid to late nineties when the Internet first started taking off and I think a lot of adult sites were doing that, they would get the misspelled britneyspears.com and redirect to some really indecent website. I’m pretty sure there are laws against that now because I know a lot of that has stopped. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, but I know there are certainly laws against doing that now. Whereas, it is illegal.
Stephan: You just gotta love getting an email from your grandmother going I don’t know why this link sends me to this (laughter).
Patrick: What are these people doing to each other? What are you kids doing on the Internet these days? (laughter)
Brad: So the new domains will actually cost $60 per year, and ten dollars of each sale will go to child protection initiatives. No real specifics on that but it just means a certain percentage, ten dollars in this case, or a certain price I should say, are going to go to those initiatives. So a little bit from the sales, they’re expecting to make over 30 million a year in the revenue which is really no big surprise, I think you add any new top-level domain, people are going to buy them, especially the common words, you know, whether they plan on using them or not they’re going to snatch up those kind of dictionary-type words and try to make money off of them. But $60 a year — that’s a bit of a commitment when you can get a regular domain for — what do they cost now, Patrick, ten or fifteen?
Patrick: Ten or less. Yeah. Find the right GoDaddy coupon.
Brad: Yeah, I’m with you, Stephan, if this was something where it was mandatory than certainly, yeah, I mean it would kind of aggregate all of that adult — basically the entire adult internet into its own little kind of section, but yeah, it sounds like that was a big deal and they are definitely saying it’s not mandatory, it’s voluntary. And you don’t have to have any proof either, I could go on there and register brad.xxx. I don’t have to prove that I’m some porn king or whatever; I can just go buy it. I think that’s kind of cool because I might like to have that.
Patrick: Well, so they said 30 million a year, that’s based on apparently 110,000 pre-reservations for the company behind it, it’s called ICM, they say they have no tie to the entertainment industry; they are “a completely independent entity with no affiliation, current or historic, with the adult entertainment industry.” And there is a board member quoted in a story at PC World, an ICANN board member, Rita Rhoden-Johnston, who says, “I still question whether in fact there is a real sponsored community here,” meaning that maybe there is some relation to the adult industry and then they would frown upon that. “The vote for it wasn’t unanimous; ICANN’s CEO Rod Beckstrom, as well as a board member, Jean Jacques Subrenat, both abstained from the vote.” And I know there’s a quote here from the CEO, Beckstrom, who says that he’s concerned about the determination by two of the three panelists at the ICANN board should not use business judgment in the conduct of its affairs. He views that they should be able to use it for the global public interest in the coordination of the Internet. So I don’t know if there’s still some concern about, I don’t know, what this promotes? I think it’s a good idea. I’m kind of with you guys on even if they forced them over there might be some legal issues there for whatever amendment you want to throw out there, I don’t know, but it would be useful for that. But even if not I don’t mind it; I think this is actually one of the few new extensions that might actually have some value. When I think of some of these other ones that have been created and thrown out there in so many ways they’re not much more than a novelty. You don’t see any large companies or even any small — for the most part small businesses — who even use like .biz. I mean really, .biz never took off and the ones that came out of that era. So, but this does have an industry and this industry is very large online, so I can definitely see them using it. Sixty dollars a year though is definitely expensive. I guess if they have 110,000 pre-orders …
Brad: They weren’t real specific on why the cost is more whether it’s to thwart domain squatters or whether it’s just to make more money, which is probably the case. It is pricey, it’s kind of like the dot me domain, I think it runs around fifty or sixty a year. It definitely makes you think twice about buying some domains when late night domain hunting. But actually CNN had a poll on June 28th just last month asking do you think the pornographic websites should have their own .xxx domain, and they had about almost 240,000 people vote and it was 83 percent of the voters were actually in favor of it which was just under 200,000 people were in favor of the .xxx domain, whereas about 40,000 were not. So it sounds like the vast majority of people out there think it’s a good idea, I mean we all kind of agree it’s a good idea, so hopefully it goes through and I can launch brad.xxx, my new blog (laughs). I’m sure 100,000 xxx domains have already been registered so you can pretty much guarantee all the cool ones are gone. Now you’ve got to start getting clever with your names.
Stephan: Is brad.xxx going to be a golfing site, your golfing endeavors?
Patrick: Actually you know the movie series with Vin Diesel, Brad looks like him a little bit.
Stephan: Oh, there you go.
Brad: We both have the same haircut. (laughter) That’s probably where the similarities end.
Stephan: So, if you are Finnish you are in luck. Our next story is out of Finland talking about all Finnish residents are now given the right to one megabits per second broadband. The Finnish government has said that the government telecommunications companies will be obliged to provide Finns with an internet connection with the minimum speed of one megabit per second. This is kind of a big news story, guys, it’s a country with a population of 5.3 million, so it’s a fairly large population — I would say a major city — lives in Finland and they all have free internet now. So what do you guys think?
Brad: I’m moving to Finland. It’s done.
Patrick: Is it free?
Stephan: Yeah, they’re guaranteed the right. I mean I’m sure they’re tax rate, I haven’t looked up what their tax rate is, but I’m sure it’s going to be part of the budget of the country.
Patrick: Yeah, I don’t know, I’ve always watched with interest at the discussion of internet being a right or as something that is an undeniable part of our life, it’s definitely growing in importance. I don’t have a great concept for how much speed that is compared to what I have, I should run a speed test, but I do know I have to pay for mine so I don’t know.
Stephan: Well, the Finnish government said that it will offer broadband internet access up to 100 megabits per second to every resident by 2015. So 100 megabits per second, that’s pretty darn fast.
Brad: It’s really sad that the country that invented the Internet, the U.S., has some of the slowest average internet speeds in the entire world. I mean we’re seriously lacking behind other countries. And one megabit is not blazing fast speed, it’s a good connection but it’s not blazing fast. Skype for me typically takes a little bit more bandwidth than that as far as upload rate to work properly, at least in my case where I’m at, obviously it varies, but it’s a nice precedent. I mean it would be nice to see something like that in the U.S. because you see all these commercials for cable, internet and DSL and satellite internet and all these different ways you can go, and they all say high speed internet, but not many of them will go into specifics on what those speeds are unless you go to their website and you go to the advanced details, and most people have no idea what that even means.
Patrick: 56Kv.90.
Brad: Wait, that’s what you’re on? (laughter) You still dialing up over there?
Patrick: Shhh!
Brad: You’re like the one person keeping AOL in business.
Patrick: I’ve got my US Robotics modem over here; let’s flip that bad boy on.
Stephan: He’s got a stack of CDs Brad.
Brad: But I mean it would be nice. So if I sign up for almost every cable provider and even DSL, their lowest package is less than a megabit, its usually like around 500 or 700 kilobytes per second. And they call that high speed internet which is fine, but then they kind of tier it so if you want to go a little bit faster you’ve got to pay ten extra dollars a month or even faster than that. So obviously I usually get the fastest one I can get just below like business grade. But by the time you do that now you’re spending 70, 80, 100 bucks a month.
Stephan: Is it throttled, do you think, at the provider’s level for you? If by buying the lower connect –
Brad: Obviously I don’t have any facts to back that up. I don’t know honestly. For me it’s just not fast enough, you know, we do the podcast via Skype; I’ve had issues when I moved into a new place and I just signed up for the Internet and didn’t think about asking them the speeds, it wasn’t fast enough, so I called back and I wasn’t quite as rushed so I had time to go through the packages and found out that, yeah, there was a ten dollar upgrade I could do that would basically double my speed and it made Skype perfect. So it’s like you just kind of gotta check that, but I think it would be nice in this country, at least in the major areas, where there’s at least some kind of expectation that I can at least get a megabit and higher. Now whether the government pays for it that’s a whole another story.
Stephan: Yeah, I think that’s part of the thing here is that the government the way it sounds like they’re guaranteeing the telecommunications companies are going to be giving one megabit per second. So I don’t know if it’s actually giving the people free internet, that’s not the way I read it, because the UK is trying to do something similar because only 73 percent of Brits can get on the Internet from home. So the Labor government revealed plans to offer every Brit a 2 megabit-per-second internet connection just recently.
Brad: Yeah, the way I read it is that it’s their legal right to get it if they want. I don’t know if it’s technically free. Yeah, it’s like if you want it it’s there, it’s got to be at least that fast.
Patrick: The thing about that is what about network abuse though? I mean there’s got to be some understanding here.
Stephan: Well, they’ve also had how they’re going to affect these plans to temporarily cut off illegal downloaders and combat net piracy and so there’s a big argument going on that by doing this, by us guaranteeing this right, then we can’t cut it off then, we can’t cut off people who are doing things illegally.
Patrick: They can’t do anything, right? They can’t literally do anything unless maybe if they stop paying their bill. I mean maybe there’s more to this than we think. This is kind of a short story, maybe there’s a little more detail here, but I don’t know much about Finland so it’s hard for me to say what the ISP business is like there, if it’s normal to have the government being a big part of that or not. But it would seem at least from my perspective, or businesses, and they need to be able to protect their networks in one way or another, I don’t know, it’s just kind of strange to say okay they have a right for it as long as they pay their bill.
Brad: If they prove that they were doing something illegal then they would probably be able to shut that off I would assume. I mean if they were passing child pornography they would be able to turn that internet off in that house and get the people responsible for it. So if they were doing something illegal and if you’re doing stuff like P2P or Torrents or anything like that, your bandwidth usage is going to be way above the normal users, I mean it’s going to be a red flag in any case. But you’re right, whether they can legally stop that, that’s obviously up for debate.
Patrick: Yeah, according to a quote from Finland’s Telecommunications Minister Suvi Linden, in a story at BBC linked through PCworld.com they say, “We will have a policy where operators will send letters to illegal file sharers, but we are not planning on cutting off access.” So you know some strongly worded letters with no teeth, I don’t know if that’s the end all solution there.
Brad: You better stop it!
Patrick: Yeah, you better stop it or we’ll talk about you.
Brad: Or we’ll send another letter.
Patrick: Yeah. But I did run a speed test at speedtest.net to figure out what my speed was; it is, I’m on the outer banks of North Carolina with Century Link, and it is at 5.16 megabits per download and .60 megabits per second upload. Did you guys run that test?
Brad: Yeah, I have pretty quick — I have Verizon FIOS, so I actually have 25 megabits down and 16 megabits up, so I’m on there top package.
Patrick: Yikes! You must be on fire.
Brad: Well, I may not be that fast. I think they do 30 megabits up and down, it’s the next level up, but it coincides with what channels you get. It’s like if you get all the movie channels you get faster internet, it’s weird, but it’s fast.
Patrick: Does your computer just automatically download HD video content for you while you sleep or something or what? I’ve never experienced that fast before.
Brad: No, I mean, you know.
Patrick: Does it know what you’re thinking and then automatically downloads it?
Brad: It’s downloading faster usually than I can click. That’s how it should be, I mean the Internet and the speeds ultimately should not even be a factor. In 10 to 15 years from now hopefully we’re not even talking about internet speeds because it’s just as fast as it can be and that’s it, you click a link it loads, you download something it’s done. Eventually speeds are going to be relative; it’s not going to matter.
Patrick: That’s visionary stuff.
Stephan: I get 20.6 megabits down and 2.26 up.
Patrick: Man, I’m awful! I thought I was decent over here.
Stephan: But then again I’m in the center of the city.
Patrick: We actually pay for, because Century Link has I think three tiers, or at least they did when we signed up, a 20, 30 and 40, I think, or 29, 39, and 49; we actually paid for the top tier 49, and this is the top tier so I don’t know, but that’s the best I can get I think.
Brad: So have you ever wondered what it takes to be a top 100 website or maybe a top 10 website or maybe a top 1,000 website, which is probably a little more realistic for us.
Patrick: SitePoint is one.
Brad: Yeah, SitePoint is one. Pingdom.com, which we actually talked about in the last gathering show — and before I go off on this I’ve got to say Pingdom is an excellent example of business blogging, in my opinion. They write some really great articles and they’re not trying to shove their services down your throat. They just write about relevant news in their industry, which I think it’s a great example of business blogging, but that’s kind of a side note. Anyway, pingdom.com has this great article that kind of breaks down with beautiful graphs, which Kevin would love if he was here, breaks down kind of what the traffic marks are for the top 10, top 50, top 100, top 500, top 1,000 websites so you can get a rough idea. If you want to get to that elusive top ten, how many unique visitors are you going to have to have a month? So do you guys have any idea of let’s say top 1,000, do you have any idea of how many unique visitors a month that would take?
Patrick: I cheated.
Brad: Assuming you haven’t read the article, which I know you have.
Stephan: I would guess something like eight million.
Brad: Yeah, I would’ve guessed probably around that too, and it’s actually quite a bit less, it’s top 1,000 websites start right around the 4.1 million uniques a month which is actually a little lower than I would’ve assumed.
Stephan: That’s what I thought too, and I mean I would’ve expected something higher just because you think about websites that get 4.1 million visitors, I don’t know of any.
Brad: These are uniques again, so these are not views, we’re talking unique visitors. And so roughly that breaks down into about 136,000 a day-ish to get in the top 1,000. So top 100 takes quite a leap from that, obviously, and to get to the top 100 you’re looking right around the 22 million unique visitors per month which is a pretty large jump as expected. And top 10, that’s a monster jump, so what do you guys think, top 10 website? There’s not very many of them out there.
Stephan: 300 million?
Brad: No, actually 230 million. 230 million unique visitors per month will get you in the top 10. And they do note in this article that a lot of these stats were produced by Google who also leaves out their own website, so they don’t actually count Google or YouTube. They tried to inject that back in based on other stats, but it’s ballpark; it’s only a few sites obviously that are out of these numbers. But it’s pretty interesting data, I mean obviously as web developers and designers this is kind of our ultimate goal is to be associated with a website that’s in this chart that we can say is in the top 1,000 or top 100 or best case scenario number one. They actually do have the stats for number one which, of course, is Facebook at the moment, and they’re right around 540 million unique visitors per month.
Patrick: Google.com has to be more than Facebook though, right?
Brad: I thought reading stats that Google was number one and Facebook was two, but according to this they’re saying it’s Facebook. I’m not sure how accurate that is, but you know.
Patrick: Well, Google, yeah, the data is from Google Ad, well, DoubleClick Ad Planner, Double Click got bought by Google. Like you said, it’s an estimate of unique visitors excluding the Google sites. It’s interesting to peruse through it, it is the top 1,000, it starts at 3.9 million and goes up to 540 million like you said. Just pulling through the list here it’s interesting to see a lot of different sites, and even some sites that aren’t really let’s say websites but that are like ad networks so they’re getting a lot of traffic. Like number 71 is Extend Media, that’s an ad network that I use and they’re not like a portal or a website people will visit, they’re just an ad network. So there are some sites like that in there as well. The Pirate Bay comes in at number 100, interestingly Alexa’s number 97, a lot of that might have to do with the toolbar, some of these networks that are funny to look at and analyze and figure out why they’re there.
Brad: Where does SitePoint fall? Did you get their ***(35:45)?
Patrick: I was trying to see if it was, but I notice that you have for example, let’s see a site that jumps out at me; Victoria’s Secret is five million, that’s the same as National Geographic.
Brad: Pillar of our society.
Patrick: And actually the same as ZDNet or just under ZDNet, same as pogo.com the game site, and yeah, there’s a lot of sites here I don’t recognize. NBC.com is losing to victoriassecret.com, so NBC, one of the major four cable networks here in the U.S., I don’t think a good showing there, but it’s funny to go through the list and take a look at where they all fall.
Brad: Yeah, it’s pretty extensive. It’s definitely neat to kind of go through it and see how many you recognize, and there’s a lot that are overseas or that are familiar to us but I’m sure very familiar to some of our listeners. So it is neat to see where your favorite sites stack up.
Patrick: Yeah, because we only are obviously aware of what we’re aware of but, for example, Bydo is obviously a huge search engine, just not in the U.S., and they’re the number seven site in this list. WordPress.com is number nine followed by Mozilla and Bing. So WordPress.com is actually higher than Bing.
Stephan: That’s impressive. They should be proud. That’s good news.
Brad: And Bing should be proud. I mean really obviously they have a lot of money behind them, but they’ve only been around, what, a year and a half?
Patrick: That’s a fair point too as people like to beat up on Microsoft, take that Stephan.
Stephan: Touché!
Patrick: But to be fair, msn.com is five, and that’s kind of the same group of search lists.
Brad: I think we all know why that is. Isn’t that still the default page for Internet Explorer? I believe it is; msn.com.
Patrick: What’s the default page for Safari? Because that’s not anywhere! No, I’m just kidding.
Brad: iPhone bumpers.
Patrick: Is apple.com on here? Let’s see, it’s 23.
Brad: Yeah, 23.
Patrick: Microsoft.com is number six. Yahoo still has a firm grasp here, number two behind Facebook. A lot of people think Yahoo is on the way out, but they still have a lot of traffic.
Alright, guys, why don’t we go around the table and share our host spotlights for this episode, Brad, why don’t you go first.
Brad: Sure, so my host spotlight is actually a top ten list and it kind of goes with our browser theme since I like Chrome, it’s 10 best Chrome extensions for web masters. It has a list and a lot of these I hadn’t actually heard of. I haven’t gone through the extension list in a few weeks, so some of them might be newer, but there are some really nice ones on here. There’s Chrome SCO which gives you a lot of SCO kind of stats, Speed Tracer, you can track page load times, Chrome Editor, Webpage Screenshot, that’s a really handy one it takes screenshots of web pages and saves them down. One that I just installed that I’m loving is Chrome Muse which is just a URL shortner, but it puts it right into the actual address bar, puts a little link there, you just click that and it hooks into like 20 different shortening services so you can pick whichever one’s your favorite, you just click the link and it just shortens it and puts it right in your clipboard, so that’s a really nice one. Resolution Test, a lot of ones that are really good for developers and designers, so if you’re into Chrome and you love to develop this is definitely a list you want to check out.
Stephan: Mine is not web related really.
Patrick: Yes!
Stephan: Minus the fact that it’s on the Internet. There’s a British commentator named David Mitchell and he has a feature called David Mitchell Soap Box, and this week, yeah, it was this week, Thursday, July 1st, he has a feature on the Camelopard which is the old name for a giraffe and what they used to be called. And he goes into the history of that and it’s really funny and it’s a really well done video, and so it’s a little bit of comic relief for Friday when this is released.
Patrick: Yeah, I actually hadn’t seen this video until your blog and I really enjoyed it, especially the end part about the cats. ‘Don’t like your dog, tired of its unwavering love for you, well, here’s a new product, cat’ (laughter).
Stephan: Selfish cat. (laughter)
Patrick: That was really funny. Well, sticking with the off topic video theme, my spotlight is a new ad campaign for Ciroc Vodka, and this is an advertisement called Perfectly Smooth. It features Sean Diddy Combs, who I’m a big fan of, and also comedian Aziz Ansari, who’s in the new film Get Him to the Greek. And it’s just a really funny commercial of the two kind of going back and forth to prove who’s the smoothest, and there are a lot of ads out there but this ad was more like just watching a funny clip, so I thought it was really well done and check it out for a laugh.
That’s it for this week. Where can they find us online guys?
Brad: I’m Brad Williams from Web Dev Studios. Check out my blog, strangework.com, and Twitter: @williamsba.
Stephan: I’m Stephan Segraves, you can find me on Twitter: @ssegraves and my blog is badice.com
Patrick: And I am Patrick O’Keefe of the iFroggy Network, ifroggy.com. You can find me on Twitter: @ifroggy.
You can follow our usual co-host Kevin Yank, @sentience, and SitePoint at < />@sitepointdotcom. You can visit us at sitepoint.com/podcast to leave comments on this show or any show, and to subscribe to receive every show automatically. Email [email protected] with your questions for us. We’d love to read them out on the show and give you our advice.
The SitePoint podcast is produced by Carl Longnecker.
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Theme music by Mike Mella.
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