• Delicious: Lean Domain Search | The fastest way to find a great domain name Similar to pandabee, a nice way to find a lot of available domains.

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!

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:

• http://oranlooney.com/json-round-trip/ – Only sane explanation of getting/sending JSON with node.js
• https://github.com/broofa/node-uuid – Great little node.js library to generate UUIDs
• http://icalvalid.cloudapp.net/ – Fantastic iCal file verifier, like W3C’s HTML validators. Thank you internets.
• http://arguments.callee.info/2010/04/20/running-apache-and-node-js-together/ – Simple explanation and code for doing small proxying from Apache to node.js
• http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545 – The official RFC (whew!) on the iCal file format.

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:

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?

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?

• IBM Remail project - http://www.research.ibm.com/remail/ - circa 2003 and Lotus Notes
• Focused on building a new client. Resembles Outlook if you ask me, or a lot like Gmail today with integrated chat, pulling calendar items out of email contexts
• One thing I liked from their screenshots was the lack of exact timestamps (6:30 pm, 9:00 am, etc.) which removes the odd urgency that feels required
• Some really fantastic base research and publications at http://www.research.ibm.com/remail/publications.html
• “Affordance” is the technical term for a lot of these ideas in IS research.
• Check out Asana for any new tricks they’ve come up with
• This guy covers a couple of different action-based ideas for email clients: http://blog.gaborcselle.com/2006/07/how-researchers-are-reinventing-mail.html

Topics to research

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

Enter Fever°.

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

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!

• Delicious: LiteratePrograms:Welcome – LiteratePrograms Every article is simultaneously a document and a piece of code that you can view, download, compile, and run by simply using the “download code” tab at the top of every article.

• Delicious: HDR Tutorial | High Dynamic Range Tutorial An HDR technique by Trey Ratcliff that uses only one RAW image to generate the end result, instead of a set of bracketed photos., Think with Google – Your resource for industry trends & insights A small, well-designed quarterly “magazine” from Google, with good long-form content.

• Delicious: On Testpad: Online Payments For SaaS Billing Good run down of various payment services, plus a lot of good points to consider. My experience with Chargify has been pretty good so far, but it’s always nice to see competition in the field.

If you were building a large new datacenter, would you rather pay $0.10 per gigabyte for your storage, or $1.10? What if I told you that you should pay $1.10, and that it would save you almost 40% over 10 years? You would probably guess that I had flunked math (which luckily I only came close to doing in AB calculus), but there is a method behind the madness, and one that deserves a closer look.

Here’s the scenario: you are a part of an organization that is gathering historical scans from all around the world and will be archiving them for posterity. The data needs to be stored in a lossless format, and will collectively amount to 1.4 petabytes of data per year. Also, the images will need to be made available on-demand to lucky users across the Internet. How will you go about designing an infrastructure to handle these needs? This scenario is based on a real world implementation, and was given to us in an enterprise applications class with the instructions to create a feasible proposal for the project. While examining the various aspects of the project, we found that using solid state drives would be a huge cost saver in regards to total cost of ownership over the course of 10 years.

When storing large amounts of data, more than raw purchase price needs to be taken into account. Other important costs that must play in include factors such as:

• failure and replacement rates
• power costs
• cooling costs
• capacity (throughput/output) requirements

Typical enterprise-grade platter-based hard drives can cost as low as $0.10/MB to purchase, versus around $1.00/MB for a solid state drive¹. Also, HDDs currently have much higher capacities than SSDs, with large SSDs typically maxing out at around 480 MB instead of 1 or 2 terabytes on HDDs. However, because solid state drives have no moving parts and run much cooler, they have lower failure rates. Furthermore, and more importantly when discussing costs, they draw drastically less power and require much less cooling than an array of hard drives². Finally, when considering the need to serve read access to clients through the Internet, throughput becomes important. An SSD cluster can deliver on average 20-100x more throughput than can a comparable HDD cluster, even when properly RAIDed. Thus, the need for mirroring and splitting requests across drives drops significantly.

We plotted out the costs of an infrastructure using both traditional HDDs and new SSDs, considering the amount of drives that would need to be purchased at different times, the power and cooling costs, replacements, etc., and discovered that over the course of ten years, running a datacenter with SSDs would save an estimated $20,376,103.50, or 38%, when compared to the HDD option (HDD TCO: $52,535,121.04; SSD TCO: $32,159,017.54). While the first few years require a greater upfront investment in the actual purchase of drives, the savings in power, cooling, and replacements costs after year 5 begin to pay off substantially by the end of the product (see chart, full calculations available as a Google Spreadsheet here³). This result certainly surprised us, but it makes sense when you consider that adding space with hard drives is a very linear operation—the more drives the more heat and the more power. While solid state drives are pricier to purchase, their TCO is much lower when considered in mass quantities.

Many organizations are beginning to recognize this. Pure Storage is focusing on this angle, eBay recently deployed 100TB of solid state memory in their data center, and big data is really coming into its own. All of this just goes to demonstrate that we may be on the verge of a new and different data center, and that larger upfront costs may just pave the way for less expensive operational costs in the long run.

I certainly make no claims to being an infrastructure or hardware expert, or have experience in data center operations, but at least this was a good learning exercise for me. Remember, don’t discount options right away just because they appear to be more expensive at the outset!

Sources:

1. Denali, “SSD and HDD Economic Forecast: Analyst Jim Handy Speaks Out,” Jan 26 2010, http://www.denali.com/wordpress/index.php/dmr/2010/01/26/
2. SSDs consume 15% the power of HDDs and have a 2 million hour MTBF lifespan. “Unified Storage for Dummies,” Oracle.
3. Calculation assumptions are noted in the spreadsheet.

• Delicious: CS193H: High Performance Web Sites

• Delicious: Shapecatcher.com: Unicode Character Recognition

• Delicious: RentSavvy

• Delicious: Optimize Apache for WordPress Tips and tricks for optimizing the httpd.conf file.

• Delicious: Trefis: Corporate $ Visualizations Very interesting way of visualizing how a company’s stock value is split amongst its different business units and product lines.

• Delicious: BluCSS

It works again, and will stay activated in my browser until Google decides to put it back. For more information, see my page about it.

• Delicious: ZURB – The Power of Why – ZURB – Interaction Design … How can your business be more like Apple and Martin Luther King? Use “Why” as your explanation, not “What.”, What Lucky People Do Differently than Unlucky People What do lucky people do different? They keep their eyes open for tangential opportunities, and take advantage of them., Theme Code Matters, Too Great article of best practices for WordPress theme development., WordPress Essentials: Interacting With The WordPress Database … Quick overview of the $wpdb object and working with the WordPress database directly.

RIM announced Friday a 59% drop in quarterly profit, a continued indication that the company is in dire financial straits, even though the co-CEOs believe they will be able to pull off a revived victory before the end of the year. Many in the industry acknowledge RIM’s downward spiral over the last few years, and many wonder if anything might stop it. But how did RIM get into such a predicament? There have been no HP-like corporate scandals, no rogue traders, and no massive natural disasters to throw it off course. Millions of businessmen and businesswomen, as well as consumers, still use their products.

Could the answer be that a lack of clear strategy has caused the dismal performance we are seeing today? Let’s analyze RIM in the framework of Michael Porter’s definitions of types of strategies and see where the company lies.

Porter, in his seminal HBR article “What is Strategy?,” clearly points out that a strategy is not simply being better or more efficient than your competitors. Instead, “competitive strategy is about being different” (Porter, 64). And how can a company establish a set of activities that differentiates it? By one of three broad means: having a variety-based, needs-based, or access-based strategy.

1. Variety-based Strategy

A variety-based strategy is employed by a company that produces a subset of products or services, generally through using a different set of activities. Porter gives the example of Jiffy Lube providing only oil change services to customers, detailing that it “specializes in automotive lubricants and does not offer other car repair or maintenance services… Its value chain produces faster service at a lower cost than broader line repair shops” (Porter, 66).

What products and services does RIM produce? They are in two general markets: enterprise email relaying and mobile phone production. Do either of these show signs of being a subset of a broader set of activities that could give RIM an advantage?

Over two decades ago when RIM was founded, the ability to page someone (and later email them) and have them receive that page or email instantly was a technological feat that many businesses around the world found essential to their day-to-day functioning. Even up until just a few years ago, having email pushed to you (as opposed to pulled, the typical, slower method) was a service offered almost exclusively by RIM. However, nearly all email clients and smartphones now support or emulate this type of functionality, and so what used to be RIM’s key selling point has now become diluted and common across all providers. This used to be a key element to RIM’s strategy, but their competitors have caught up with them.

Second, RIM’s phones also used to be rather unique in the market, providing larger displays and the ability to type emails and browse the web from any location. With the advent of the iPhone and all smartphones since, RIM’s BlackBerry phones have fallen far behind. One unique BlackBerry feature that is not mirrored in many other phones is the tactile keyboard, which some people like much better than on-screen keyboards. In a way, this particular subset of phones, those with physical keyboards, is serving a particular market need, but RIM does not have any particular activity that sets the production of this apart from its competition.

RIM seems to have invested deeply in a variety-based strategy in the past, but this strategy has since been duplicated and superseded by its competition. Unless it can come up with a new subset of products or services, it cannot continue to hold on to such a strategy and expect to succeed.

2. Needs-based Strategy

Michael Porter also discusses a needs-based strategy, one which he defines as the position of “serving most or all the needs of a particular group of customers” (Porter, 66). He mentions that this is similar to what most see as traditional market or segment targeting.

RIM used to produce phones that were heavily targeted to and used only by business professionals. Most common consumers didn’t need the constant inflow of emails 24×7, nor did they want to pay the extra fees for the service. Business professionals needed several features: the ability to instantly receive and reply to all messages securely , the ability to check on Internet resources, the ability to have a secure, remotely wipeable device, and the need to have a high-use cell phone. RIM catered to all of these needs very well, and while this aspect of strategy might not be as strong as the previously mentioned variety-based strategy, it certainly helped them to obtain the lion’s share of the business mobile market.

Unfortunately again for RIM, their competitors have struck with equal and often more compelling solutions to the same issues, giving both business and IT professionals more appealing and easy-to-use products. All smartphones can now receive all enterprise email, and the BlackBerry’s web browser is a laggard these days compared to iOS and Android browsers, leaving a painful experience for those still using RIM’s phones. Other enterprise-specific needs are also covered well by competitors these days, so RIM’s strategic advantages have disappeared.

3. Access-based Strategy

Finally, has RIM played into an access-based strategy before? Has it targeted customers in a specific “customer geography or customer scale” (Porter, 67)? Not really—its customers are all over the globe, and everyone from a one-man shop to a corporation with tens of thousands of employees can use the service. Therefore, we can conclude that RIM in the past has not pursued an access-based strategy (though perhaps it may now wish to consider it, given that its other two strategies have been deconstructed).

Conclusion

While the maker of the CrackBerry is trying to pull out some wunderstops with the introduction of the very me-too PlayBook tablet (which lacks any sort of distinguishing feature or specific target market) and the promise of a new phone operating system (too little too late?), it is clear that a lack of recent innovation has led to a lack of current, viable strategy. While RIM was the king of enterprise mobile communication until just a few years ago, thanks to a strong variety-based and a decent needs-based strategy, the company is floundering to find a clear differentiation in today’s market. Businesses have to find a way to “be different,” as Porter said, and being different by being worse doesn’t count.

Sources:

1. Porter, Michael. “What Is Strategy?” Harvard Business Review, November 1996, 61-78

• Delicious: When to Buy Airline Tickets and More Travel Advice

• Delicious: A Fair(y) Use Tale – YouTube A hilarious explanation of copyright laws, done through Disney movie clips.