Monthly Archive for March, 2009

Visualizing Information Overload

By Brad on March 26, 2009 in Information Overload. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Matthew Hurst over at the Data Mining blog wrote an interesting post last week. The topic is one that we have written about here on the Bscopes blog: Information Overload. But more specifically than that, he talks about user interface… about visualization… about the stuff near and dear to our hearts.

Matthew very simply states the basics of RSS Overload. He describes the two simple textual views that an RSS reader gives the user and assigns them very clever names, “big lumps (TechCrunch (341 unread posts))” and “atoms (individual posts)”. And he is right. RSS aggregators let you look only at the text. The only perspective the provide is at the detailed individual post level or at the entire feed level. And that works wonderfully — so long as the feed velocity is low (number of posts x rate of postings per day). Too much information and you overload.
Matthew goes on to debunk the idea that people will be able to trust some sort of automated system that tells them which posts are “interesting”, asserting that people will have trouble trusting that they won’t miss something important. I’d say that it’s more that people are irrational. In fact, Predictably Irrational to use the  title of Dan Ariely’s book and blog. Perhaps Matthew isn’t a computer scientist but is secretly a closet Behavioral Economist. Either way, he’s right on. People are paranoid that they will miss something. Worried that the filters they put in place will pick up a false positive and something great will be filtered out. And in two of the comments to that post, Dimitry and then Veomer both try to discuss both Artificial Intelligence and trust. But in a later comment Matthew brings it all back to trust.
So, instead, Matthew asks for some kind of “innovation at the UI level”. Some way to see the big picture perhaps? A way to visualize the blogosphere? A way to cut through the clutter? To see the forest for the trees? A way for me to mangle metaphors while asking rhetorical questions?
I’d like to humbly submit that he is exactly correct. A way of seeing the picture — both big and small — is what is needed. And, I’d claim that what we have started here at Bscopes is our attempt to innovate at the UI level. We think it is a start. And, that it is working. That, by using bscopes and bspaces, you can begin to find the conversations you want to focus on, and to ignore the rest. Are we right? You tell us. Give us your overloaded OPML files, your huddled RSS feeds yearning to be free (I’ve got to stop writing blog posts late at night). Take a look at the ways you can view the blogosphere and then let us know what you think.

Not All Blogs Are The Same (or… Some Blogs are More Equal Than Other Blogs)

By Brad on March 18, 2009 in Information Overload. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , .

Eating Dog FoodI’m realizing that I really don’t look at all my RSS feeds as the same kind of homogeneous, overwhelming thing. Ok, let me back up and start from the beginning. {insert wavy flashback graphics and sound effect here}

I had spent the past weekend plus (72 hours or so) actually living life. You know… writing code for Bscopes. Chauffeuring the kids around to Tae Kwon Do, etc. Finally watching the hour of Battlestar Galactica recorded on my HD TiVo before the series goes off the air. Not that it wasn’t a good weekend… it was. But, not once did I have time to sit down in front of Google Reader.

When I did have time to try and catch up, there was, as you’d expect, a massive RSS Overload. And I did, as you’d expect, use Bscopes to help manage it. Like Steve posted about last week, I found conversations in the Blogosphere. That was good. Definitely helpful. But, I still wasn’t in Blog reading heaven.

What Went Wrong

Part of my problem was using Bscopes equally on all the Blogs in my feed reader. However, they really weren’t all the same. I think I am dealing with several different categories of blogs in my feed aggregator:

  • Must Read Blogs — The ones that have two attributes in common:
    1. The author almost  always writes something brilliant, or funny, or insightful.
    2. The author doesn’t post more than a few times a day or even just a few times a week.

    (Here let me share a little link love with bloggers who, I’m sure, don’t need it like Seth Godin or Mark Evanier).
    These are blogs I know I’ll fully consume no matter how far behind I get.

  • No Need To Read Blogs — The ones that I never intend to read 100%. I do read some articles on these blogs, but notmost of the articles. Two examples of these are:
    1. News articles. I get mine from Google News. But CNN, the Washington Post or any other set of headlines show the same pattern. They publish a ton of RSS posts each day (ton ≈ hundreds) and the posts almost never link out to anything. Do other blogers link in to them? Sometimes.
    2. Deal of the day sites. I have one for Amazon deals and also DealMac. I hardly ever buy, but do check to see if some amazing bargain shows up. Again, links aren’t really a big deal here. Usually the only one is to the deal itself.

    For these type of feeds, I can scan them by with putting Google Reader into list mode (where all I see is the post’s title in a compact list). That’s all the info I need to decide if I read it or skip it. My biggest problem is an emotional one… I just need to get past that nagging feeling that I’m missing something when I skip over things. It’s the completest in me that needs to collect 100% of something. To be black and white rather than gray.

  •  Love/Hate Relationship Blogs — This is the more complicated category. Somethings I love and hate about some blogs I try and read:
    • Brilliant writing: I’ve found blogs that say something profound, insightful, or useful. But not always. Maybe not even most times. The most frustrating ones are the ones that are brilliant just often enough to keep me from dropping them, but which have many articles I don’t like at all.
    • Group blogs: I’ve found blogs where some of the articles are great. And where others stink. And then I notice that it’s because there are 3 or 4 or even 10 people writing on the blog. It gets even more frustrating when no one person is consistently interesting, but the blog is interesting overall. The MakeUseOf blog is like this. Sometimes this blog has the most amazing and useful stuff; but it depends on who is writing the post and what they are writing about.
    • Specialized news from a fire hose: I’ve always loved movies and TV. And as a certified geek (I can still name way too many trivial details about ST:TOS and ST:TNG) I find sites like AICN to be wonderful sources of info on what is out now and coming soon. But even though the site’s topic is focused, it still covers too many things I that I don’t care about (I never did like Buffy or Firefly, so sue me). And it still publishes way too frequently to consume. TechCrunch is another example of this. Sometimes it is wonderful entrepreneurial and tech info. Other times it’s just Mike Arrington ranting. But no matter what it publishes a ton of posts every day. I want to read it all but sometimes can’t keep up.

    These are the type of feeds where my Google Reader fails me. The volume of posts per day combined with the number of blogs that I have a love/hate relationship with is just too big. If I miss a day or two then I can’t catch up and read them all.

What To Do

I’m coming to the conclusion that the most fertile progress with Bscopes will be found by concentrating on this third kind of blog and not the other two. I think I need a few more tools out of Bscopes:

  • Sort feeds into some big piles — Some way of taking the full set of feeds and grouping them so I can focus on just the ones that need Bscopes’ help the most.
  • A way to focus on a subset —To designate a smaller subset of all the feeds. I’ve got tags. Tags are good. But I’m talking about subsetting based on how I want to treat the feeds and how I want to search, sift, graph, and visualize them. Not based on their subject matter.
  • A way to zoom back out and look at the big picture  — To see the way that the winds are blowing (to use Christophe’s metaphor). To find the interesting conversations. To see the popular posts that are linked the most.
  • A way to zoom in and understand the details —to be able to see the individual posts, headlines (and maybe even some text) for the elements of a conversation in the blogosphere. So that I can decide if it truly is interesting and should be read or should be skipped.

I guess I need to go now and start working on those tools and some others. Now that I’m starting to figure out what it is I want out of Bscopes. (Who knew eating your own dog food could be tasty?)

Of course, there is the possibility that I’m completely wrong. And, there is the strong probability that if I am, Steve will tell me quite quickly. But all you Bscopes users are also reading a ton of blogs. So… you tell me… what else do we need to help you cut through the clutter? The “post a comment” button is just a few pixels away.

More on Conversations — Politics

By steveg on March 9, 2009 in Bscopes Features and Concepts and Information Overload. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , .

It all started as a simple discussion about politics. A straight forward left-right dialog about current events and comments by and about Rush Limbaugh. When Brad said, I wonder if we can find a blog conversation about this topic. . . . .and there it was. Just a few clicks and voila! Right there in the middle of the Politics Bspace.

Bspace of Politics

As I said before, I had discovered (more like stumbled on) a conversation while looking at the Bscopes of several leadership blogs. So of course, I’m now looking for these kinds of cross-links deliberately in the various blogs on the Bscopes site.

It should be no surprise that I found the very blogs I tagged with ‘politics’, such as: Huffington , Andrew Sullivan, National Review, and Kudlow (in no particular order). But here’s the interesting part, I found new blogs I hadn’t known about, like European Democracy, Featherly, and EconLib that are present in the larger politics space tagged by other Bscopers with similar interests.

Some of these new blogs had posts related to the conversation I was reading and some didn’t, but I added them to my own Bspace. Now I’m watching their graphs daily and read only the posts of interest. In much the same way that Christophe points out in his article, the map shows what is included, what is nearby, and may even be an directional indicator.

Now, I have more stuff to argue with Brad about!

Take a Tour

By Brad on March 4, 2009 in Bscopes Features and Concepts. 1 Comment Tags: , .

Tour Guide

“And we’re walking, and we’re walking, and we’re stopping.” — Dave (1993)

What is Always the Last Thing on a Software Project?

As experienced software developers, Steve and I feel we must conform to all geek stereotypes. In this case, it means that documentation comes last.

What Is Bscopes?

We keep getting the question from people (mainly our parents and spouses, but they are people too). So we put together a guided tour of the Bscopes site. Each section of the tour explains a set of the features of Bscopes. We also give samples of what you can do on Bscopes.

Our goal is go help new users get the most out of Bscopes. But, since we know how to use Bscopes, it’s a little difficult to pin down exactly what to explain and in how much detail.

Please take a look at the tour and leave a comment on this blog post letting us know what you think. Or what else you’d like to see added. Or subtracted. (multiplied? divided?) Just leave a comment to let us know that we aren’t just blogging into the wind.

Weather Radar — What a Great Metaphor

By Brad on March 3, 2009 in Information Overload. 6 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Radar DomeNow 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).Spindle Award

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.

RSS Overload, Blog Overload, Information Overload — It’s All Overload To Me

By Brad on March 2, 2009 in Information Overload. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Overload!

Complaining via Twitter

Complaints about how overloaded everyone is reading blogs have moved over to Twitter. I guess that bloggers are so overloaded  that they don’t have as much time to blog about how overloaded they are.

Is Everyone Overloaded?

We have written about this before. And I’m sure I could easily write yet another post on how overloaded everyone is. How there is a consensus that there is a problem. But you know what? I don’t really feel like talking about problems any more. I feel like doing something about them instead.

I’ve got the same RSS overload that all these other people have. But I don’t want to bitch about it. Steve and I wanted to write some software to fix it. And, now we’ve done that. Or at least a first crack at doing that.

The Bscopes Challenge

What we really need now is experience and feedback and usage. So I’m issuing a challenge to all of those overloaded bloggers and RSS readers whose tweets and posts I linked to above. Come sign up for Bscopes (the free account is fine, but if you want to sign up for a Gold account we won’t complain). Load in a ton of RSS feeds. Then start looking at individual Bscopes and group Bspaces.

Once you’ve started looking, let us know if what we’ve built really does help reduce your overload or if we are just full of it. Submit a comment. Send us an e-mail. Tweet your thoughts. Even write an entire blog post if you like.

We have the same problem. So we built a tool to help fix the problem. We think we’ve got something here. Now we need to find out if anyone else thinks so. So… talk to us. Unless, that is, you are too overloaded to get around to reducing your RSS overload ;-)