Segaran (author of the highly-recommended Collective Intelligence) and Hammerbacher have collected together a diverse set of essays on data collection, visualization, processing, and analysis. What interested me most was the wide variety of application areas in which data is the “secret sauce”. The essays range from broadly philosophical to deep in the technical details: so you’re likely to find something at your level of interest (though that also means that much of the book may not hit your level).

Jeff Hammerbacher’s chapter on Information Platforms and the Rise of the Data Scientist is a good example. It discusses Facebook’s history of scaling its data storage and analysis capabilities, starting with custom scripting based on SQL, moving to data warehousing and then beyond to Hadoop and related tools. “More data, simple models” is the processing style that characterizes many such Big Data enterprises today.

Other valuable chapters for me:

• Data Finds Data (Jeff Jonas and Lisa Sokol)
• Natural Language Corpus Data (Peter Norvig)
• Connecting Data (Toby Segaran)

While you’re not likely to find a solution here to specific technical problems, there’s a good chance you’ll find something either to broaden your horizons or give you some new ideas. Definitely recommended.

(Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book through O’Reilly’s Blogger Review program.)

Finally got my slides posted from BibleTech:2011 on Using the Bible Knowledgebase for Information Integration. Since i listened to good advice and went a little more toward graphics than bullet points, they’re not completely self-explanatory (but that’s why you should have come, right?).

Audio will show up too at some point, probably at http://www.bibletechconference.com/speakers.

As i’ve told a few of my colleagues since: giving the talk helped convince me even more strongly that Biblical Events will be a really important database for Bible study. Looking forward to getting it all put together.

Just in time for Holy Week, which started yesterday with the traditional celebration of Palm Sunday in most Protestant churches … i love this subway-style Holy Week visualization from the folks at BibleGateway.

(I did one two years ago that compares the Gospel descriptions of the different events of Holy Week, though it’s somewhat visually-challenged: Blogos post here).

Listening to a podcast by Justin Maxwell for CHI Conversations* raised an interesting question. He was talking about how we all have cycles and mood changes in our lives that affect our interaction with software: the lunch time at the gym, the afternoon doldrums. Based on his previous work with Mint, there were big differences in people’s interactions around paydays, when there’s both a large inflow of money and a lot of bills to be paid. College students tend to break up more frequently before Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Which leads to the question: what are your cycles and moods with respect to Bible study (whether via software or print)? For most of my life i’ve considered morning the optimum time for personal Bible reading: my mind is fresh, and i can take those thoughts with me into the day. Sunday morning (and maybe Wednesday Night Bible Study for the churches that still have them) are obvious times of higher activity. What about Saturday morning compared to weekday mornings: more or less usage? More Bible reading during Lent?

In the digital age, Bible search engines and programs that talk to the cloud have the potential to identify some of these variations. For example, someone associated with one of the large Bible search sites told me they saw a spike in usage in the late hours of Saturday night (pastors preparing their sermons?). We’ve seen some similar upticks in various websites operated by Logos, though i haven’t been able to do a careful analysis.

So i’d be interested to learn more about the cycles, moods, and seasonal fluctuations of Bible reading and study. I’m interested in your own personal reflections, but even more in any studies or data you might be aware of.

It really changes things when the CEO gets on board with digital literacy. Book by Michael Sampson User Adoption Strategies.

No adoption = no value: you have to plan for adoption. Rogers Bell Curve: perceived utility and ease-of-use matter a lot, which comes back to design. Tip: establish a glossary. “It’s really hard to sit behind someone using your software and not tell them what to do”. “Ideas are cheap, but they still feel like my heart.” “Analytics is the one area I’ve neglected most.” Everything BIG started small. Progressive disclosure: give people a slow introduction to features, don’t overwhelm them up front.

Some interesting sites for augmented reality:

• stickybits: attach comments to physical objects with barcodes.
• Greengoose.com: temperature/sound/vibration sensors. Instrumentation of everything.
• GE smart grid
• Layar: find people who tweeted nearby, wikipedia articles. You can create your own.

The mobile revolutions means the goal of software now must be to reach the user wherever they are.

BibleReader 5 is their application: showed it on iPad. Originally used EverNote for note synchronization, but wasn’t a good fit. Resource Guide is a new additional to pull in everything in their library that relates to the passage you’re reading. Other library integration around lexicon entries.

They have around 300 volunteers at some level of activity. Testing and UI translation are big areas of activity: also data management. Also user support: about 600 support tickets per day. They also spend a lot of effort on app store management and review (like voting down troll comments). Social media “omnipresence”: we want our users to feel like YouVersion never sleeps.

Be ready when people sign up to volunteer. Some volunteers act as management, but more it’s clear communication. For internationalization, each language has a lead who makes sure the translations are getting done, that enough people are active, and that the translations are accurate.

Managing all the volunteers used to consume 40% of his week: now they’ve broken it down.

They use HighRise HQ for managing volunteers (37 signals). [also Google Groups, Wave, BaseCamp, Skype conversations]

• Where do they come from? Somebody volunteered, we said yes and posted about it, and now we get 10-15 signups a day! All over the world (but English is required).
• How much do they work? Minimum is 5 hours, all the way up to essentially full-time. Use MyGengo for managing volunteers.
• Why did you start recruiting volunteers? We’re part of a church, so it was natural.
• Do you vett them before they get involved? Yes, similar to our hiring process for staff.
• How do you handle legalities? Hard problem: we choose wisely who we allow on the team. They sign an agreement that code they write for YouVersion belongs to YouVersion, and that they won’t steal their thunder. [comment: in our non-profit, we can't even have interns because of legalities.]
• What about quality of work? Quality is a result of passion, not skill. We have a culture of excellence and don’t accept mediocre work.
• How do you keep them engaged in projects? Need to not see them as “free label”: let them work on what they’re passionate about and make sure they’re working on things that are meaningful.
• What don’t you let them do? Volunteers don’t create the vision.

Scott is @scottmagdalein on Twitter.

Core goals:

• create an environment for studying the Bible
• maintain feature set of bible.lifeway.com
• raise awareness of the HCSB
• sampling strategy for HCSB study notes

Bad timing: started with Silverlight, then moved to HTML 4 (with a little flash). “We get more compliments over how we presented our Strong’s data … ” Development from features to community and awareness. Using MSB.to for URL shortening. Windows Phone 7 is more valuable because of its connection to Xbox (in response to a tweet from @BobPritchett). My Notes tab is coming soon.

Questions:

• Feedback mechanisms? “we consider our feedback link our most important feature”
• Other feedback channels?

Aaron is @linne on Twitter.

Given the explosion of devices, how can we write once and then publish to all the different formats and devices? Jim’s current assignment: figure out how to go from the basic translation programs to other formats using markup languages.

Some deeper details about how to use CSS for specific formatting purposes.

They’re creating a library of videos projects to provide visual representations of the Bible story: 55 stories from Matthew. Created a Jerusalem set in the desert outside Salt Lake City. They expect to cast in the hundreds. High production values!

They’ve combining the videos with personal testimonies in services: one initial result was very highly ranked on YouTube. Also making videos of picture books: http://scripturestories.lds.org.