Author Archives: Joshua

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Since the announcement of the Schema.org standards for microdata back in the summer of 2011, I have wanted to incorporate the new conventions into WordPress. At first I considered writing a plugin that would add information dynamically, but this didn’t seem to be a very efficient route. Instead, I have decided to extend the default Twenty Eleven theme that is already gorgeous and well-defined, and create a child theme that builds the microdata standard directly into the template.

Adding microdata to your site has several benefits. First and foremost, you contribute to machine readable data everywhere. The Internet is a wonderful place for humans to browse, but we can make it more accessible and more consumable if we let the computer figure as much of it out as it can. Second, search engines can use this data to get a better understanding of each page that it indexes, and hopefully provide more relevant search results. (Notice that I am not saying you are going to get an SEO boost for doing this. You may, you may not, I have no idea. But if everyone included this data on their sites, the results would be better.) There are no downsides really to simply plugging the data in.

If you are using Twenty Eleven as your theme and would like to add Schema.org microdata to your site without any effort on your part, give this child theme a try. You can download it for now from my Twenty Eleven Schema.org Child Theme page. Eventually I hope to add it to the WordPress Theme repository, but it needs some testing before it’s ready to head over there.

Hope it helps!

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Presenting a little tool to the world that others may find handy: my LinkedIn Birthday Reminders web app. It hooks into the LinkedIn API, grabs a list of your contacts, and generates an iCal file that you can import into your calendaring program and receive reminders throughout the year. (Can be imported into Outlook, Google Calendar, OS X’s iCal, etc.)

Screenshot of LinkedIn Birthday Reminders

The motivation behind creating this? First, LinkedIn gives you no easy way of exporting the data yourself. Second, I needed an excuse to learn Node.js. A few hours and an entire RFC later, I had a nice working prototype.

How does it work? It begins with the official LinkedIn API, and the ability to do an OAuth sign-in from any site. When you click on the sign in button (and don’t worry, I never gain access to your credentials), LinkedIn authorizes the request, and then some Javascript extracts a list of your contacts’ names and birthdays. This is then sent to my Node server and script via AJAX, and for everyone that has a usable birth date, the Node script cycles through them and generates a .ics file to download. The link to the file is passed back to the browser and presented as a download button, and after the download is complete, the file is then scrubbed from the server. Fairly simple stuff, and when I get around to it, I’ll put the source on GitHub. If you spot any bugs, be sure to let me know!

I invite you to try it out and grab the downloadable .ics for your contacts, and then make everyone’s birthday a little bit brighter by sending them some special day wishes!

Resources used:

Small Aside

Want a reason why I think the OS X operating system is fantastic? Check out the icon for this .ics file that I downloaded using my app:

iCal Parsed icon on OS X showing the date and title of the first event

The fact that the date shown is Oct 7 and the text says “Christian’s Birthday” is no coincidence—that is the first event in the .ics file! Now how cool is that? :)

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Your alarm goes off at 5:30 AM and you reach for your smartphone, which cheerily notifies you that overnight you received 54 emails. And you only went to bed five hours ago. After a quick glance, you reply to a couple and get up to start the day. After arriving at the office you’ve suddenly receive another fifty, and so you take the first hour of the workday to sort through them and respond to those that you can. A 9 AM meeting cuts you short, but you continue to tap out a couple of replies during the boring bits. All throughout the day your laptop is dinging and popping up notifications about new and urgent request from colleagues to get them those numbers for the report, or to figure out where the best place is to get sushi. You receive several hundred emails throughout the day, and despite your best efforts, your unread count consistently hovers around 1,200 or so. Finally, quitting time rolls around and you head home, only to later take an hour or two away from your family and rest in order to try and tackle a few more in the futile attempt to get down to inbox zero.

Sound familiar? This is the doom loop experienced by many people, especially managers and executives who are suffering from information overload. No one is immune to a complete glut of messages, information, reminders, and group communications. Yet the email system we employ remains generally the same as it was over 30 years ago, when email was invented. Well, believe it or not, technology has come a long way in the last 30 years, and I believe we are finally at a point when we can begin tackling this issue head-on and improve the work lives of many people, subsequently giving them more time to spend with their family and friends.

Why doesn’t our email client tell us what needs to be done in the next five minutes? Why do we still treat inboxes like massive lists of equally-weighted unique messages? Why are we not using the resources of the cloud to apply more machine learning to the conversations we have to allow us to be smarter about them? Which behaviors are bad when it comes to communicating, and which are beneficial? Though not exactly declarative of what the future will really be like, perhaps we can glean some good ideas on communication from this video:

Motivation

It is the final semester of my masters program of Information Systems at BYU, and we are enrolled in a capstone course where we have free reign to choose a project that melds all of the material we have learned over the past several years into a culminating show of knowledge. I followed a Ph.D. prep track during my degree and therefore wanted to incorporate and hone the research skills I gained in those classes. I’ve been searching for a project that would be more than just building a web app or creating a marketing plan; I truly want to start changing the world. When I saw businessmen and women who are also husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, taking unreasonable amounts of time out of their day just to try and keep the beast that is email in its bursting cage, I found a problem that finally fit the bill.

As I am still formulating the exact streams of research I want to pursue and the deliverables I want to create over the next three and a half months, I am operating at a general overview level. As such, let me just share with you some notes that I have been jotting down as I’ve explored different ideas. There is no real organization to this, and it may just be my own thoughts hastily copied down. However, I will be honing my concentration over the next few weeks and will include more detailed, knowledge-rich posts as I go. In the spirit of open knowledge, I will include all my research here for public consumption. For now, here’s what I’m thinking:

Braindump:

  • Email is a huge timesink for executives, and they never ever catch up
  • It represents huge inefficiencies introduced by…???
  • What do we need to do to fix it?
  • Some are beginning to claim that “email is dead” and that social will overtake it. Email will not die, but it will evolve. I want to be a part of that evolution.

Fixing it:

  • Introduce natural language processing to automatically categorize and sort messages based on their content (what project is an email referring too, what actions are required in it, is it just an announcement, etc.)
  • Apply contextual clues to the email, like the org chart and where the person and other people lie in it to assign weight
  • Remove emails out of the “line item” view, and into more a natural, project group view
  • I should be able to look at my email client and have it tell me what I can get to next, what I need to do.
  • People don’t want to spend time building filters, categorizing, or sorting. Facebook taught us this. (Can we use a social graph to add context like they do?)
  • Labels are way better than folders. What is better than labels?

Questions

  • Does Gmail’s priority inbox work for some people?
  • How do you solve the issue of a new message always popping up and distracting you from an existing task? (Well, don’t have a popup or a sound notification)
  • What do plugins like Xobni bring to the table?
  • What exactly are the inefficiencies? (I’m guessing research has covered this before)

What has been covered before?

Topics to research

  • Natural Language Processing (NLP)
  • What efforts have worked before?
  • Affordance

Call for Help

Please, if you or anyone you know has even the smallest bit of domain expertise in email, communications, affordance, NLP, or machine learning, I would love to talk with you! You can’t solve big problems in a vacuum or alone, and I will need all the help I can get. Contact me here.

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I love reading, and I love keeping up on news. Because of this, I have been an avid fan of RSS technology, and specifically of Google Reader, for a long time. In fact, according to the Reader stats, I’ve gone through over 65,000 articles since I started using the product back in April of 2008. That’s a lot of great knowledge and information! Unfortunately, it has started to become a large source of information overload and a time sink. I felt this most acutely when I was working full-time at internships and keeping busy with my family in the evenings. It’s hard to scan several hundred article titles a day and read the ones that may be interesting, and it simply wasn’t working anymore.

Enter Fever°.

Fever Logo

Fever° is a web application written by the venerable Shaun Inman that acts sort of like an RSS reader, but takes it to the next level by sorting out which articles should actually be important to you, and bubbling only those to the top for consumption. The basic premise is that if a piece of news is important, several different websites will all link to the same original source, and the more sites that do so, the more important the news is. By only showing you what’s hot (and by critically leaving off unread counts) you can get down to what is truly interesting without having to wade through hundreds of articles yourself.

How has my experience been? In short, very good! Let me share a little anecdote that illustrates how pleasantly surprised I have been by Fever°.

After installing the PHP-based application on my server and setting it up with all my existing subscriptions via an OPML export, I categorized my “must reads” out from the “sparks” and it came back showing me seven or eight stories that it deemed important. Some of them indeed were, and I clicked through to read the articles they referenced. Every day for one week there were perhaps five or so interesting articles that Fever° separated out, and I often read them all. However, I was only spending about 15 minutes a day reading through these articles, whereas before cleaning out my Google Reader would occupy an hourish a day cumulatively. I began to feel that perhaps I was missing out on little gems that I would have otherwise caught, because maybe Fever° didn’t see a lot of other blogs linking to the same source. I got a little nervous, and decided I would revisit my week’s worth of unread Google Reader items and see what I was missing.

Unread count: 747 items. So I began trudging through. I’m pretty good at scanning headlines and skipping the fluff, but in the end, I had only selected out 8 articles to skim that I hadn’t seen come through Fever°, and only 2 of them were really something I might have been interested in! Only two articles in a whole week that I might have otherwise read, versus the several a day that Fever° picks out for me. All right! It was then that I realized just how well the product was working, and how much more efficient it had made my content discovery. Awesome!

A screenshot of what my Fever window looks like right now

A screenshot of what my Fever window looks like right now

Quips

I still have a few adjustments to make to get used to Fever°, though in general it is a very well executed and designed program (not that you would expect less from Shaun). A few issues bother me that come to mind:

  • I occasionally get timeout issues when the cron script is running in the background to update feeds. The timeout limit has even been bumped up to an absurd 360 seconds, and the 500 errors still roll in sometimes. I assume this is because one or two feeds are just not responding and causing the blocking PHP script to hang (this would be a great use of a non-blocking component with something like Node.js or similar). A little niggle, but still kind of annoying to know that the refresh doesn’t complete from time to time. It would be great if Fever° would log slow queries for troubleshooting.
  • The algorithm for pulling titles is not perfect, and sometimes leads to poor results. For example, several blogs linked to a report about the iPhone 4S consuming lots of data because of Siri, but the links to that story in each post were one or two word links like “new study” or “a study.” Fever° put the title of that particular story as “new study.” Not exactly helpful, and happens more than I would like.
  • You can view posts using either an excerpt view or a full view. Excerpt view is nice because it keeps things compact, but sometimes the click areas to get the full view are a little confusing. Probably just need to get used to it.

Conclusion

Overall, I am very pleased with Fever°. It was a purchase I had been considering for a while, and with the time it has saved me already, it has paid for itself a couple times over (it costs $30). It only works as well as the feeds you supply it, but I’m happy to report that my information intake has been satisfied, and my time spent significantly reduced. If you haven’t already, check out its website and watch the demo video, you’ll learn a lot from it.

I am beginning a somewhat related information overload study this semester at school, which I will begin writing about tomorrow. Using Fever° has reinforced my belief that information overload can be dealt with, and the results will make your life better!

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