As I was browsing through many of the Bscopes that we generate each day I started to notice a pattern. Although each individual Bscope looks different — because each blog is different — I was seeing similarities in the pictures.
I quickly found two big categories of Bscopes:
- Single black line graphs
- “Blue Cloud” graphs
Ok. What to make of all of this? I don’t totally know. Let’s look at some examples and do some compare and contrast — you take apples and I’ll take oranges. (Click on the Bscopes to see each one larger in a separate window.)
Single Black Line Graphs
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| Bscope of the Daring Fireball blog | Bscope of the Wired News: Top Stories blog | Bscope of the Ars Technica blog |
The line of connected black nodes (circles) visually shows each new blog post in chronological order. It’s the backbone of any blog’s RSS feed. But, on these Bscopes, there are no other links from any post. That means that each of these blog’s posts doesn’t contain any outgoing links (<a href="">) in the post.
Then there’s a cluster of green nodes all linking to a single red node. This pattern shows other web sites (the green nodes) that contain a link to this blog’s main page (that’s the red node) — shallow linking only to the main URL.
I’ve seen this pattern repeated in several very popular blogs and it seems to be consistent over time. Even as the individual blog entries change the blog’s overall style.
If you take a closer look at one of these RSS feeds either on our site or in your newsreader, the main thing you’ll notice about these “black line” blogs are partial RSS feed blogs. While the full blog post might contain outgoing links, the partial feed usually doesn’t. Single black line graphs provide a quick visual indication that a partial RSS feed is being subscribed to.
“Blue Cloud” Graphs
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| Bscope of the Solutions Watch blog | Bscope of the Mashable blog | Bscope of the Gaping Void blog |
On this type of Bscope, there is still the same backbone of Blog posts — a central line of connected black nodes. These blogs also embed links to other websites in each blog post. These are shown by a blue arrow connected to a blue node. Links to previous posts on the same blog are shown by arrows between the black nodes. This style of Bscope is characterized by the large number of links on each blog post. For now, I’m calling this a “blue cloud” graph.
In addition, the green nodes (other websites) seen in the other style of Bscope are present here too. But in the “blue cloud” graph I’ve noticed that the links are not only to the top level of the blog, but are also directly linking to individual blog posts — deep linking directly into the site. This makes the resulting Bscope more complex due to all the interconnections.
And sometimes, these other websites are linking to older posts that are no longer present in the blog’s RSS feed. We show those older posts as additional red nodes on the Bscope.
And this means?
I don’t entirely know. Here’s what I can tell already…
Clearly these two types of Bscopes are different. To me, it there are certainly some simple Bscopes and some complex Bscopes. Or linear Bscopes and “flowering” Bscopes. I don’t know. Maybe Steve will come up with a better name.
Having these Bscopes is already giving me the ability to categorize my RSS feeds. Now, at a glance, I can tell which partial RSS feeds I’m subscribed to. So I’m already happy with the fact that Bscopes are letting me gain an insight into the set of blogs that I’m reading and apply that to each new blog I consider adding to my feed reader. This is a first step in helping me to “cut through the clutter” and that gets to the heart of what Steve and I want Bscopes to do.
Plus, the “blue cloud” graphs lead me to believe that there may be deeper interconnections between blogs that Bscopes can reveal.
I don’t think I know enough to make any quality judgments at this point. I don’t know that the Bscopes help to tell me good or bad. Or interesting or boring. Or any other adjectives that I can find. Perhaps you agree. Perhaps not. Either way, let us know. We’d love to see any and all comments here on the blog and get your opinions on the different Bscopes and their possible meanings.
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