random musings from a serialist
I’ve had my HTC Incredible for about 10 months now, and over that time I have added (and removed) quite a few apps. Here’s a list of the apps that I’m currently using on a regular basis and would recommend to other Android users:
Books & Reference
Communication
Finance
Games
Health & Fitness
Music
News
Photography
Productivity
Shopping
Social
Tools
Travel & Local
presenter: Jamene Brooks-Kieffer
She won’t be talking about complex tools or telling you to hire more staff. Rather, she’ll be looking at ways we can use what we have to do it better.
Right now, we have too much data from too many sources, and we don’t have enough time or staff to deal with it. And, nobody cares about it anyway. Instead of feeling blue about this, change your attitude.
Start by looking at smaller chunks. Look at all of the data types and sources, then choose one to focus on. Don’t stress about the rest. How to pick which one? Select data that has been consistently collected over time. If it’s focused on a specific activity, it’ll be easier to create a story about it. And finally, the data should be both interesting and accessible to you.
By selecting only one source of data, you have reduced the stress on time. You also need to acknowledge your limits in order to move forward. You can’t work miracles, but you can show enough impact to get others on board. Tie the data to your organizational goals. Analyze the data using the tools you already have (i.e. Excel), and then publicize the results of your work.
Why use Excel? It’s pretty universal, and there are free alternatives for spreadsheets if you need them. Three useful Excel tools: import & manipulate files of various formats (CSV files), consolidate similar information (total annual data from monthly worksheets), and conditional formatting (identify cost/use over thresholds).
The spreadsheets are for you, not the stakeholders. Stop relying on them to communicate your data. The trouble with spreadsheets is that although they contain a lot of data, it’s challenging for those unfamiliar with the sources to understand the meaning of the data. Sending a summary/story will get your message across faster and more clearly.
Data has context, settings, complexities, and conflicts. One of the best ways of communicating it is through a story. Give stakeholders the context to hang the numbers on and a way to remember why they are important. Write what you know, focus on the important things, and keep it brief and meaningful. Here is an example: Data Stories: A dirty job.
Data stories are everywhere. It’s not strictly for usage or financial data. If you have a specific question you want answered through data, it makes it easier to compose the story.
Convince yourself to act; your actions will persuade others.
presenter: Katy Silberger
She will be showing three scenarios for observing user behavior through statistics: looking at the past with vendor supplied statistics, assessing current user behavior with Google Analytics, and anticipating user behavior with Google Analytics.
They started looking at usage patterns before and after implementing federated searching. It was hard to answer the question of how federated searching changed user behavior. They used vendor usage reports and website visits to calculate the number of articles retrieved per website visit and articles retrieved per search. They found that the federated search tool generated an increase in article/use. The ratios take into account the fluctuation in user populations.
Google Analytics could be used to identify use from students abroad. It’s also helpful for identifying trends in mobile web access.
speaker: Gary Price
Giving generalities about mobile devices is challenging because there are so many options. If your library doesn’t already have a mobile website, go for a web app rather than something platform specific.
The cloud can be a good backup for when your devices fail, since you can access it from other places. But, choose a cloud service or backup service carefully – consider reputation and longevity. If you see something you want to preserve for future use, save it now because it could be gone later. Capture it yourself and keep it local.
Backup your computer (pay now or pay later). Price recommends Mozy and Carbonite. Also, pay attention to the restore options (internet vs. DVD).
[I kinda zoned out at this point, as I’m pretty sure he’s not going to talk about much of anything I don’t already know about or will read about on Lifehacker. Unfortunately, choosing a seat in the front row prevents me from politely leaving to attend a different session.]
presenter: Wren Lanier
Why use WordPress as a CMS for a small website? It’s flexible enough to build all sorts of kinds of sites. It’s free as in beer and there is a huge support community. It has a beautiful admin (particularly compared to other CMS like Drupal) that clients like to use, which means it is more likely to succeed and make them happy repeat clients.
First things first. Set up a local development server (MAMP or XAMPP) or use a web host. This allows you to develop on a desktop machine as if it were a web server.
Next, download dummy content like posts and comments. There are plugins (WP Dummy Content, Demo Data Creator) or imports in XML form.
Start with a blank theme. You could start from scratch, but nobody needs to reinvent the wheel. Really good ones: Starkers (semantic, thorough, and functional), Naked (created for adding your own XHTML), Blank (now with HTML5), and more.
A blank theme will come with several php files for pages/components and a css file. To create a theme, you really only need an index.php, screenshot.png, and style.css files. Lanier begs you to name your theme (i.e. sign your work).
Now that you have a theme name, start with the header and navigation. Next, take advantage of WPs dynamic tags. Don’t use an absolute path to your style sheet, home page, or anywhere else on your site if possible.
Make things even more awesome with some if/then statements. You can do that in PHP. [I should probably dig out my PHP for Dummies reference type books and read up on this.] This allows you to code elements different depending on what type of page you use.
Once you have your header file, build your footer file, making sure to close any tags you have in your header. Code the copyright year to be dynamic.
It doesn’t have to be a blog!
If you’re going to create a static homepage, make sure you name the custom template. If you don’t do this, the WP admin can’t see it. Go into Reading Settings to select the page you created using the homepage template.
Now that you have all that, what goes into the custom template? Well, you have the header and footer already, so now you put THE LOOP in between a div wrapper. The loop is where WP magic happens. It will display the content depending on the template of the page type. It will limit the number of posts shown on a page, include/exclude categories, list posts by author/category/tag, offset posts, order posts, etc.
Once you have your home page, you’ll want to build the interior pages. There are several strategies. You could let page.php power them, but if you have different interior page designs, then you’ll want to create custom page templates for each. But, that can become inefficient, so Lanier recommends using if/then statements for things like custom sidebars. A technique of awesomeness is using dynamic body IDs, which allows you to target content to specific pages using the body_class tag depending on any number of variables. Or, once again you can use an if/then statement. Other options for body classes.
Finish off your theme with the power of plugins. Basics: Akismet, All-In-One SEO, Google XML Sitemaps, Fast Secure Contact Form (or other contact form plugin), WPtouch iPhone theme. For blogs, you’ll want plugins like Author Highlight, Comment Timeout, SEO Slugs (shortens the URL to SEO-friendly), Thank Me Later (first-timer comments will get an email thanking them and links to other content), and WordPress Related Posts. For a CMS, these are good: Custom Excerpts, Search Permalink, Search Unleashed (or Better Search, since the default search is bit lacking), WP-PageNavi (instead of older/newer it creates page numbering), and WP Super Cache (caches content pages as static HTML and reduces server load).
Questions:
What about multi-user installations? She used Daren Hoyt’s Mimbo theme because it was primarily a magazine site.
At what point do you have too many conditional statements in a template? It’s a balancing act between which is more efficient: conditional statements or lots of PHP files.
How do you keep track of new plugins and the reliability of programmers? Daren Hoyt & Elliot J. Stock are two designers she follows and will check out their recommendations.
What is your opinions of premium themes? For most people, that’s all they need. She would rather spend her time developing niche things that can’t be handled by standard themes.
How do you know when plugins don’t mesh well with each other? Hard to keep up with this as patches are released and updates to WP code.
Where can you find out how to do what you want to do? The codex can be confusing. It’s often easier to find a theme that does the element you are wanting to do, and then figure out how they designed the loop to handle it.
Are parent templates still necessary? Lanier hasn’t really used them.
Leave WP auto-P on or off? She turns them off. Essentially, WP automatically wraps paragraphs with a p tag, which can mess with your theme.
presenter: Chris Gatewood
Questions:
WordPress is in GPL, so you can’t charge for that. You can develop and own rights in whatever you do that is separable from the platform itself, such as themes. Plugins are tricky, because even if you build your own, it may unintentionally replicate the coding for existing things.
Should you work with a lawyer to develop contracts for bloggers? Not necessarily. Develop modular agreement templates that can be used and swapped out as needed.
How do you develop a collaborative relationship with clients? Bring bagels. Find out who in the company has time to talk about the project. There’s no substitute to in-person meetings or phone calls. [Sounds like they need to learn how to do a library reference transaction.]
What kinds of information (historical or otherwise) can your library share with visitors/users through location-based networks like Foursquare and Gowalla?
The History Channel is on Foursquare, promoting their series America The Story of Us by putting tips on particular historical locations that include history trivia about the location. It got me to think about how libraries, or at least local collections, could do something similar with tidbits from their archives.
There have already been some examples of libraries inserting references to their digital collections on Wikipedia, and this is an opportunity to add some enhancement and self-promotion to a social media network that seems almost designed for this sort of thing. What kinds of information (historical or otherwise) can your library share with visitors/users through location-based networks like Foursquare and Gowalla?
Speaker: Lynda Kellam & Beth Filar-Williams
Check out the presentation wiki for a list of the tools and such. I’ll just note the ones I really like or other commentary I might have. They’ve grouped them into three categories: tasks, notetaking, and scheduling.
The presenters are using Poll Everywhere to get audience input on which category to focus on first, as well as asking for hands for which one. They started with Tasks.
Things is awesome, but Mac/iPhone only. Without a cloud-based interface, it’s not accessible by any other OS. Based on Getting Things Done, the application helps you organize tasks based on contexts.
Todoist is cloud-based task tool. I just started using it myself because I wanted something that could let me add sub-task to tasks.
Remember the Milk is also cloud-based, and like Todoist, it has a mobile interface. Unlike Todoist, it has apps for Blackberry and Android as well as iPhone. Tasks can also be added by SMS. One complaint I had was not being able to see a list of everything due today or overdue in the main web interface (can see it in Gmail), but now I know how to create a saved search that shows overdue tasks (dueBefore:today) and tasks due today (due:today).
The presenters have lots of scheduling tools to share. I’ve heard of only one of them, Schedule Once. The presenters are most excited about jiffle, which pulls your Goolge Calendar availability along with your own selection of available times, and allows the user to request a meeting through the site, but only for the available times. This is really useful for students scheduling personal appointments with instruction librarians. If you’re not using GCal, there is likely a tool that will allow you to sync your calendar with a GCal account.
Cozi integrates calendars, photos, widgets, journals, tasks, and is more geared towards groups or families. It might be more friendly for folks who are not comfortable with disparate, more complicated tools.
They don’t have many notetaking tools listed (Google Docs, Evernote, & wikis). More folks were interested in Evernote. Personally, I just haven’t found a good way to integrate Evernote into my life/work, and I’m not interested in paying for the premium features until I have a reason to use it regularly. I like using the journal feature of Outlook for taking work-related notes, and I rarely need to note things for personal stuff beyond adding them to a task.
Speaker: Krista Godfrey
She isn’t going to show how to create LibX or Zotero access, but rather how to use them to create life-long learners. Rather than teaching students how to use proprietary tools like Refworks, teaching them tools they can use after graduation will help support their continued research needs.
LibX works in IE and Firefox. They are working on a Chrome version as well. It fits into the search and discovery modules in the research cycle. The toolbar connects to the library catalog and other tools, and right-click menu search options are available on any webpage. It will also embed icons in places like Amazon that will link to catalog searches, and any page with a document identifier (DOI, ISSN) will now present that identifier as a link to the catalog search.
Zotero is only in Firefox, unfortunately. It’s a records management tool that allows you to collect, manage, cite, and share, which fill in the rest of the modules in the research cycle. It will collect anything, archive anything, and store any attached documents. You can add notes, tags, and enhance the metadata. The citation process works in Word, Open Office, and Google Docs, with a program similar to Write-N-Cite that can be done by dragging and dropping the citation where you want it to go.
One of the down-sides to Zotero when it first came out was that it lived only in one browser on one machine, but the new version comes with server space that you can sync your data to, which allows you to access your data on other browsers/machines. You can create groups and share documents within them, which would be great for a class project.
Why aren’t we teaching Zotero/LibX more? Well, partially because we’ve spent money on other stuff, and we tend to push those more. Also, we might be worried that if we give our users tools to access our content without going through our doors, they may never come back. But, it’s about creating life-long learners, and they won’t be coming through our doors when they graduate. So, we need to teach them tools like these.
Use your Google Notebook and the free Gnotes app to cull together a custom recipe box on your iPhone or iPod Touch.
I’ve been playing with a iPod Touch from work for the past few weeks. One of the first things I did was dig around for interesting and useful free apps that don’t require constant 3G connections to work effectively. One thing I knew I needed was a functional note-taking tool that would sync the notes with my computer(s), and that’s how I stumbled upon Gnotes.
Basically, this application syncs with your Google Notebook and pulls the text of the notes to the iPod/iPhone. The first thing I did with it was type out the words to some choral pieces I needed to memorize, and after I got comfortable with the interface, I began thinking of other things I could do with it.
One of the apps I first searched for was something to collect, store, and display recipes I wanted to use. There are plenty of free and pay apps for recipe collections, but I didn’t want fifty bajillion recipes to sort through, and I don’t have a wireless router at home, so I needed something that could be used offline. Then it hit me — why not use my Google Notebook for this, too?
It works well, and I have the ingredients list with me for last minute grocery shopping. Here’s how it looks on the iPod Touch:
One down side to this versus using a printout or paper note card is that you can’t see the whole recipe in one screen, so you’ll need to make sure you scroll down far enough to have everything visible you need for that step in the process. You also might want to edit the recipe instructions to include the amount of each ingredient (if it isn’t like that already) within the text, to avoid scrolling up and down each time to check for quantity.
Open question/answer forum with Tim Westergren, the founder of the Music Genome Project and Pandora Internet Radio.
June 29, 2009
approx 100 attending
free t-shirts! free burritos from Chipotle!
Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora
His original plan was to get in a car & drive across country to find local music to add to Pandora, but it wasn’t quite as romantic as he thought it would be. On the way home, he planned a meetup on the fly using the Pandora blog, and since then, whenever he visits a new city, he organizes get together like this one.
Tim is a Stanford graduate and a musician, although he didn’t study it specifically. He spent most of his 20s playing in bands, touring around the country, but not necessarily as a huge commercial success. It’s hard to get on the radio, and radio is the key to professional longevity. Eventually, he shifted to film score composition, which required him to analyze music and break it down into components that represent what is happening on the screen. This generated the idea of a musical genome.
The Music Genome Project was launched in 2000 with some seed money that lasted about a year. Eventually, they ran out of money and couldn’t pay their 45 employees. They tried several different ways to raise money, but nothing worked until some venture investors put money into it in 2004. At that point, they took the genome and repurposed it into a radio (Pandora) in 2005.
They have never advertised — it has all been word of mouth. They now add about 65,000 new listeners per day! They can see profitability on the horizon. Pandora is mainly advertising supported. The Amazon commissions provide a little income, but not as much as you might think they would.
There are about 75,000 artists on the site, and about 70% are not on a major label. The song selection is not based on popularity, like most radio, but rather on the elements of the songs and how they relate to what the user has selected.
Playlists are initially created by the song or artists musical proximity to begin with, and then is refined as the user thumbs up or down songs. Your thumbs up and down effect only the station you are listening to, and it effects whatever the rest of the playlist was going to be. They use the over-all audience feedback to adjust across the site, but it’s not as immediate or personalized.
They have had some trouble with royalties. They pay both publishing and performer royalties per song. They operate under the DMCA, including the royalty structure. Every five years, a committee determines what the rate will be for the next year. In July 2007, the committee decided to triple the ratings and made it retroactive. It essentially bankrupted the company.
Pandora called upon the listeners to help them by contacting their congressional representative to voice opposition to the decision. Congress received 400,000 faxes in three days, breaking the structure on the Hill for a week! Their phones were ringing all day long! Eventually, they contacted Pandora to make it stop. They are now finishing up what needs to be done to bring the royalty back to something more reasonable. (Virtually all the staffers on Capitol Hill are Pandora users — made it easy to get appointments with congress members.)
Music comes to Pandora from a variety of sources. They get a pile of physical and virtual submissions from artists. They also pay attention to searches that don’t result in anything in their catalog, as well as explicit suggestions from listeners.
They have a plan to offer musicians incentives to participate. For example, if someone thumbs up something, there would be a pop-up that suggest checking out a similar (or the same) band that is playing locally. Most of the room would opt into emails that let them know when bands they like are coming to town. Musicians could see what songs are being thumbed up or down and where the listeners are located.
Listener suggestion: on the similar artists pages, provide more immediate sampling of recommendations.
What is the cataloging backlog? It takes about 8-10 weeks, and only about 30% of what is submitted makes it in. They select based on quality: for what a song is trying to do, does it do it well? They know when they’ve made a wrong decision if they don’t include something and a bunch of people search for it.
Pandora is not legal outside of the US, but many international users fake US zip codes. However, in order to avoid lawsuits, they started blocking by IP. As soon as they implemented IP blocking, they received a flood of messages, including one from a town that would have “Pandora night” at a local club. (The Department of Defense called up and asked them to block military IP ranges because Pandora was hogging the bandwidth!)
Why are some songs quieter than others? Tell them. They should be correcting for that.
The music genome is used by a lot of scorers and concert promoters to find artists and songs that are similar to the ones they want.
Could the users be allowed more granular ratings rather than thumbing up or down whole songs? About a third of the room would be interested in that.
Mobile device users are seeing fewer advertisements, and one listener is concerned that this will impact revenue. Between the iPhone, the Blackberry, and the Palm Pre, they have about 45,000 listeners on mobile devices. This is important to them, because these devices will be how Pandora will get into listener’s cars. And, in actuality, mobile listeners interact with advertisements four times as much as web listeners.
Tim thinks that eventually Pandora will host local radio. I’m not so sure how that would work.
Subscription Pandora is 192kbps, which sounds pretty good (and it comes with a desktop application). It’s not likely to get to audiophile level until the pipes are big enough to handle the bandwidth.
Variety and repetition is their biggest areas where they get feedback from listeners. The best way to get variety is to add different artists. If you thumb down an artist three times, they should be removed from the station.
They stream about 1/3 of the data that YouTube streams daily, with around 100 servers. Tim is not intimately familiar with the tech that goes into make Pandora work.
[The questions kept coming, but I couldn’t stay any longer, unfortunately. If you have a chance to attend a Pandora Town Hall, do it!]
