Mapping, Mining and Viewing the Blogosphere
How do I know that RapidBI is one of the top leadership blogs? Well, it’s not just because they are in the heatmap of the top leadership blogs… Although that doesn’t hurt, and it shows that Bscopes has great taste… No, it’s because Mike Morrison took the initiative to not only check out Bscopes, but then to blog about it and tell his many readers and fans all about Bscopes and Heatmaps.
So a quick shout out across the Pond to Mike. Thanks! Let us know how we can help.
We are branching out! We want to let other folks take advantage of some of the things we’ve learned building Bscopes. We have learned an amazing amount about cutting edge web technologies in the past few years. Plus we’ve created a few specific pieces of specialized software as part of Bscopes that we think might be useful to others as well. We have been asked to supply this knowledge to other folks.
As a result, we’ve created a new set of new services that we are offering:
We just added the ability to share any (and all) Bscopes heatmaps with your friends. You can tweet them, “like” them on Facebook, +1 them on Google or share them on StumbleUpon.
We encourage you to share Bscopes with everyone you know.
My Heatmap
Many users have asked “How can I bookmark my heatmap, so I can easily come back to it and so I can send it to other folks?” We’ve now made it possible to do that. Through the magic of the Apache Web Server and a little elbow grease (ok, maybe a lot of elbow grease and a decent sized wrench) we got it done.
The latest Bscopes release that gave you your own Personal Heatmap includes the ability to Bookmark that Heatmap.
Your Bscopes heatmap can be easily found by using the string “user” and your User (login) Name to the Bscopes URL in the pattern: http://www.bscopes.com/user/loginname. As a demonstration, we created a heatmap specifically to collect blogs about Information Overload in a user with that login name. The Heatmap is at http://www.bscopes.com/user/InformationOverload.
This makes it possible for you to include a link to your own personal heatmap page on Bscopes.
We believe that the ability to bookmark your heatmap, leaving comments on other user’s heatmaps, and Gravatar support are a very important part of how we envision the Bscopes community working.
Give it a try. Look at the Information Overload page. Check out the heat, and while you are there, leave us a comment!
The best place to see this feature in action on Bscopes is in the comments on each person’s Personal Heatmap. For example, we recently welcomed new Bscopes user Nancy Scott . Nancy created her own Personal Heatmap at http://www.bscopes.com/user/nancyscott/. The comment we left there shows the picture for our joint Gravatar.
If you don’t already have a Gravatar, you can set one up in about a minute. Just head over to http://en.gravatar.com/site/signup/ and follow the few, simple, steps. Of course, Gravatar has a very cool blog as well……….
So from now on, you can leave comments on any and all of the Bscopes Heatmaps and everyone will be able to know who you are and what you are about.
Plus, you can leave a comment here on the Bscopes blog — where, of course, we also support Gravatars, as we naturally would 
Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning from wikipedia
Infinity by doug88888, on Flickr
We’ve written a lot about overload. Most of the time at Bscopes we are addressing the problem of trying to read too many blogs and websites. It’s our position that we’ve addressed the most common issues in our secret sauce with the Bscopes Heatmap as a tool to survive it.
Now into the second decade of the 21st century (does that make you feel old?), people are discussing a number of different sources that make them feel overloaded.
Here’s a list of the Top 5 other overload sources that we see:
1. News Overload:
Some folks are news junkies. They want (need) to consume the latest news. Despite the death of “old” media like newspapers, there is more news than ever before. And tons of sources. And almost as many content aggregators — from google news to vertical niche aggregators like Techmeme. The Bscopes secret sauce uses frequency and update interval to account for news feeds that spew content into our space.
2. Internet Marketing Overload:
If you google “overload” and look at blogs and websites, this discussion is everywhere. Apparently not only do marketers talk (and sell and market) but they talk to each other. So much so that anyone trying to learn about using the Internet for marketing seems to get overloaded very quickly. This is best controlled with a simple filter and put into its place.
3. Social Network Overload:
This is a newer form of overload. Robert Scoble seems to find the limits of each new social networking site out there. People have been complaining for a while about Facebook Overload and how they can’t keep up with the river of information in their Twitter stream. Now, within weeks of Google+ being opened up to users, people like Alexander McNabb are now complaining about how that is making them overloaded.
Google+ has finally pitched me into information overload. I’m dealing with too many streams of information and it’s becoming uncomfortable. I know I’m an unusually ‘connnected’ person: quite apart from the Twitter, Facebook, Blogger triangle, I handle reasonably large volumes of email and follow a lot of blogs and sites. I’m rarely truly offline. It’s one reason I find it funny when my bank tells me they tried to get in touch with me but couldn’t. I mean, there are people who actively try to avoid me and find it hard. It got so bad that when we returned from getting stuck under the Tikkipukkapokka, or whatever it was called, Icelandic ash cloud, I actually gave interviews to media amused that I had been caught offline in a totally analogue rural lighthouse.
We took special care to account for social streams in Bscopes Heatmaps. They are important but only in a temporal fashion. That is a text message or Tweet is HOT at the point it is written and does not typically have a lasting value. Nor does it have any value outside of the author and its recipient.
4. Conversation Overload:
I’d say this is superset of Social Network Overload. Certainly conversations occur there. They also occur via e-mail. And by Text Message. And even good, old, voice-mail tag. Folks like Tom Foremski complain about interpersonal aspect of this kind of overload:
As a journalist I have trouble keeping up with the conversations in my email, yet today I have conversations everywhere and in new places. There’s email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, my two blogs, then there are SMS messages, voicemail (which I never check) and the latest is: Google Plus.
The problem with conversations is that they are more important than not reading that great article… Conversations are with people that I work with, that I meet at conferences and events, potential business partners, friends, family, readers, supporters, and more. I want these conversations because I respect these people.
But I don’t want it to seem that I’m ignoring people or that I’m arrogant in some way, but I have to admit this — I can’t keep up! And I bet many others can’t keep up too.
I don’t know how many others. I once felt this way when I had a very different kind of job. But now, as a software developer with only one business partner, tools like GTD allow me to manage this well enough. But then again, I only follow two dozen people on twitter. And I let my wife tell me if I miss anything on Facebook. So maybe I’m not overloaded only by not participating. Or by being an anti-social nerd.
5. Cuteness Overload:
Ok. No so much the same kind of overload, Cuteness Overload still ranks very high if you search google for the word “overload”. And I certainly can get overloaded on cuteness almost instantly. Heck, I’m overloaded after even one picture of LOLCats. But, then again, I’m notably snarky.
Are these kinds of overload the same as what we’ve been discussing here on the Bscopes blog? Or are each of them fundamentally different? I can certainly see some similarities. Most importantly I think they all have the same effect on each of us. It provokes an emotional reaction. It triggers our fight or flight response and ups those stress hormones that are already too high in most of us.
What I’m not yet convinced of is if you can use the same tools to assist in each different kind of overload or if you need different tools for each job.
I think it’s kind of a “straw that breaks the camel’s back” kind of issue. Any one of these is bad enough. But when you add each new fire hose of stuff coming at you… Well, it becomes overwhelming.
For some folks it is ostrich mode. You just bury your head and forget about it. You hope it goes away. For those folks, denial isn’t just a river in Egypt.
Some folks, like Kristi Hines, give out advice on how to get organized: she makes lists on Twitter and Facebook. She trims down her use of Stumbleupon. She’s a pro at Gmail lablels. She puts her RSS feeds into folders.
Techniques like that will take you far. For some folks you can even get far enough. For others, eventually the volume increases and the overload returns.
I won’t pretend to know all the answers here. But we are curious. Bscopes has focused so far on Blog Overload and helping to manage website URLs and RSS feeds.
Since you’re a Bscopes fanatic and have thoroughly digested the Heatmap technology, the question now is what else, if anything, should we include in Bscopes?
As always, your opinions are wanted. Leave a comment below.
We’re announcing the availability of Bscopes Bronze. This is a new paid membership level for those users with an appetite for more feeds. A lot more feeds!
Here’s what a Bronze membership offers:
Plus, we have decided to keep the wildly popular policy of a free trial. When you purchase the Bronze membership, you get the first 30 days FREE. (So this is more like free beer than free speech.)
So go ahead, give it a shot. Or, perhaps you really aren’t as overloaded as you feel, if you can’t find enough feeds to put into a Heatmap.
The Bscopes Team
Temperamental by Cati Kaoe, on Flickr
The roll out of new Bscopes capabilities continues.
We currently rank the individual blogs within a topic on a 1 (cold) to 10 (hot) scale, using the now famous Bscopes Secret Sauce to collect and compute detailed blog data. When you look at a topic, sometimes there are blogs that score very high (8, or 9, 10).
Bscopes now publicizes these Hot blogs via Twitter and Facebook. We’ve created a new Twitter user: @Hot_On_Bscopes which you can follow. @Hot_On_Bscopes tweets out these blogs all day long.
Once we started doing this, we noticed something even more interesting. This time we surprised even ourselves. When you take a look at the Topic level and not just at the individual blog level, new trends emerge on a daily basis. So we applied our secret sauce to analyze how an entire topic changes day-by-day.
The result is a current temperature reading for every Bscopes topic (more than 800 of them now). Everyday we thoroughly scan, collect, and calculate every Bscopes topic, and all their feeds, to compute the temperature. Topics are scored on the following scale:
The results are linked back to the individual topic heatmap or blog detailed heatmap for fast, easy, convenient access. What we’ve seen is that Goldilocks lives on Bscopes. Some topics are always hot! Some go up and down the scale. Some never quite get above the line. And a few might be just right for you.
Since you are already following @Bscopes on Twitter, you might as well now follow @Hot_On_Bscopes.
You asked. We responded. We have toiled and slaved nights and weekends in our little home offices to create a whole new set of Bscopes capabilities.
Before you could pick from over 800 existing topics that totaled more than 60K blogs.
Now, you can mix and match all of those into a custom set of just what you are interested in. Plus, you can add new RSS feeds of your own. If there’s a url with either an RSS XML file or an OPML file, you can add it.
To cut the clutter, select only the blogs you are interested in. Then, every day, use this Personal Heatmap to find out which of just those blogs are the hottest. You can easily bookmark your Personal Heatmap page. Plus, you can even share that URL with others.
You get up to 50 blogs in your personal heatmap for free.
We will be introducing Bronze, Silver and Gold paid memberships Real Soon Now. These will add more features and larger limits for those who can use them.
Just create a free Bscopes member account. If you had previously signed up for Bscopes you’ll need to create a new account again. Just click here to get started.
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