Slimformation was a browser extension that tracked what you read. After a week of normal reading it showed how much time you had spent on politics, business, technology, science, sports, and entertainment, and the top sources in each. A reader could set a goal for each category, and it tracked whether the goal was met. It also estimated the reading level of the sources.
Every page was sorted into a topic in the browser and the record stayed in local storage, so nothing was sent anywhere.
The idea came out of the election-hacking session at the 2012 Mozilla Festival, from a group that included Larry Birnbaum
Larry BirnbaumProfessor of computer science at Northwestern and co-director of its Intelligent Information Laboratory. Co-founded Narrative Science and was its chief scientific adviser.LinkedIn ↗ and Joe Germuska
Joe GermuskaExecutive director of Northwestern's Knight Lab. A founding member of the Chicago Tribune news apps team and the creator of Census Reporter.LinkedIn ↗. The first version was a Chrome extension built in spring 2013 by Katie ZhuKZKatie ZhuBuilt the first Slimformation as a Knight Lab undergraduate fellow in journalism and computer science; went on to engineering at The New York Times and Twitter.LinkedIn ↗, Basil Huang, Amelia Kaufman, and Gursimran SinghGSGursimran SinghSoftware developer in San Francisco; as a Northwestern computer science student, the main contributor to the Slimformation prototype's code.GitHub ↗ in Northwestern's joint class in journalism and technology; their code is on GitHub. I refactored the prototype at the Lab that autumn and added a Firefox add-on alongside the Chrome extension, released in October 2013.