Bscopes Blog

Chris Saad recently wrote a blog post on Are You Paying Attention?: Filtering is so 5 years ago.

Definitely interesting stuff there. But I’m not sure that ranking a la Google is the answer to RSS feed overload. Or at least not all of the answer. Ok. So Chris wants to figure out which subset of posts on a blog does he really need to read. So he wants the posts ranked somehow. He’s implying that you don’t want or need to read every post in chronological order. And I can see where that might help him for some types of blogs that he reads. For me though I’m not so sure….

I tend to add blogs to my RSS reader based on how much I like the posts the author writes over time. Not based on strictly on how closely some or all of the posts relate to a topic. Sure… some fun ones that are all over the map on what they post about (I like to read almost anything on Newsfromme no matter what subject Mark is writing about). But most of the blogs I read focus on a single topic or a given domain. And there I want to read all the posts — even the ones that occasionally stray off the main topic. Like, for example, when I read PVRblog.

I think the problem is even worse for some folks than Chris says. The number of interesting blogs is enormous and growing. Just ranking the articles won’t be enough for me. I need something else to help digest the blog posts.

The place where I think Chris is onto something is in this idea:

There is no variation in the sound. It’s like using all the colors of the rainbow at once. The result is white. Or playing all sounds everywhere at the same time. The result is noise.

That’s the thing that Steve and I find most interesting for Bscopes to work on. How to highlight the things of interest and separate them visually. You know… wheat from chaff… the forest from the trees… the baby from the bath water. (Maybe not that last one )

And what Chris says about variation is key to us as well. Size. Color. Shape. Direction. Anything to help you picture the conversations that are going on in the blogosphere. That’s what we think is needed. Some way to focus on the most interesting conversations and then join in.

Anyway. Back to the grind.

If you enjoyed this post, then make sure you subscribe to the Bscopes RSS Feed.