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 readers 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.
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