Now why didn’t I think of that? Or better yet, why didn’t Steve think of that? (that’s the ticket… I’ll blame him!)
Christophe Deschamps has once again written a great blog post that clearly shows he gets what Bscopes is trying to do. But more than that, he has inspired us by coming up with another, different, description for our approach to visualizing the Blogosphere.
He compares a Bspace to a satellite weather map. What a great metaphor. We had been thinking of it and describing it in map like terms. But, more in an analogy to a map of the stars. Or some other large, dense kind of map.
Christophe discusses the patterns he sees in a Bspace. He likens them to weather patterns. I like this. We’ve previously written about types of Bscopes that we’d observed. But like Biologists before Carl Linnaeus, we haven’t yet reached the point where we have a good vocabulary or any kind of classification of what we see. We’d also discussed the Bspace patterns that appear, to us, to show conversations.
Christophe takes the analogy one step further. He’s been looking at how the Bspace patterns change each day (or multiple times a day depending on your Bscopes membership level). And he’s now starting to spot movements in these patterns — which he says remind him of changing weather patterns. More than that, he speculates that he might be able to learn to follow and spot these patterns even before they are fully developed.
It makes me wonder if this is what scientists felt like 150 or more years ago. When they first had the ability to communicate their observations about the atmosphere nearly instantaneously. So that they could predict the weather beyond just what they could see with their own eyes. Perhaps we are at the beginning with the Blogosphere. Maybe we can start to see patterns of conversation as they emerge and see the forest despite all the trees (talk about a painfully mixed metaphor there).
Over the past year or more, Steve and I have had conversations about adding a time dimension to our Bscopes and Bspaces. Something more than just the horizontal and vertical distribution of blog posts over time we have now. The Weather Radar Map analogy gives us new food for thought.
So… for his contribution to cutting through the clutter, we hereby award Christophe our very first “Antique Receipt Spindle” Award. (For those too young to remember this once widely used organizing device, wikipedia, the font of all knowledge provides this useful article.) Christophe you may feel free to proudly display this award on the desktop or blog of your choice.
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