If you are reading this on the blog directly then you can see in the sidebar on the right side that we’ve added del.icio.us support on our blog. (And if you are reading this from the RSS feed, give a click through to check out the sidebar.)
We decided to share the collection of resources we’ve been assembling with the blogosphere. Check out the different bookmarks we’ve added to del.icio.us/bscopes. Some of them have been saved by lots of other folks. Others are more unique.
Anyway… that’s enough for tonight.
Hi. We’re back. Sorry for the break but we’ve been off coding up lots of stuff. And of course, as with all software projects, things take longer than you think. But now we (Brad and Steve) are coming up for air and trying to get back to writing posts on a regular basis. No promises, however. 
Previously, we’ve mentioned our frustration with the problem of blog overload. Marc Hedlund’s discussion on “Tab bankruptcy” says it very well. So now, we’re ready to propose a candidate solution to this problem — some other alterntive to giving up:
We believe that you can decide what to ignore and what to pay attention to through visualizing a blog’s structure by making a map (graph) of its contents. We call this map a bscope.
Having a map gives you “bird’s eye view” helps decide what to do when faced with an overload of blogs in your rss feed reader. From that view, with the same information, the bird sees it differently.
How can that be applied to an RSS feed? Well, we see graphing as a part of the solution. Just like a map is only part of what you need to find your way.
What do we mean by this? Here’s a teaser for you. This is a sample graph of 100 blogs (based on a set from share my opml).
Hmmm…… “Curiouser and curiouser”
Next time we’ll talk about how to read a bscope and how we build them.
Back to coding more php….
Here we go again! I’m looking at all of these feeds to be read, hundreds of them, and I’m frustrated. It’s no different than email — inbox overload. The existing filtering mechanisms are just too simple. To me, it seems like all or nothing. Like the Google Reader. this is nice work. I’ve been thinking that maybe I could just put all of my RSS feeds in, but it’s only two-dimensional. I can nest and group feeds into folders, but the result is just one list of current articles. I can’t do anything else with the list. Google Reader has tags too, but that’s a separate view that I can’t combine with the first approach.
Del.icio.us is better, but only incrementally. I can see tags in a cloud or a list. Plus, del.icio.us uses color and size to give me more information without as much clutter. These “bumps” in the cloud are like another dimension, but they are still static. I can navigate into the cloud, but I can’t really manipulate (perform any operations) on the whole set.
To me, it’s the ability to manipulate the result that’s essential. Like the Kayak Airfare site. Their design uses controls to refine the the results of a search to focus on what I want. I like that, but I don’t travel as much as I used too.
I look at a large set of feeds and think about dissecting it to find my “mental blog space“. That’s what I’m interested in, not reading ALL 10,000 at one time. What I want is set operations: intersection, union, and search on groups of things. I want to use both predefined as well as my own tags and have various controls to manipulate the entire group as a whole, and share the result with others.
Oh well………
Chris Saad recently wrote a blog post on Are You Paying Attention?: Filtering is so 5 years ago.
Definitely interesting stuff there. But I’m not sure that ranking a la Google is the answer to RSS feed overload. Or at least not all of the answer. Ok. So Chris wants to figure out which subset of posts on a blog does he really need to read. So he wants the posts ranked somehow. He’s implying that you don’t want or need to read every post in chronological order. And I can see where that might help him for some types of blogs that he reads. For me though I’m not so sure….
I tend to add blogs to my RSS reader based on how much I like the posts the author writes over time. Not based on strictly on how closely some or all of the posts relate to a topic. Sure… some fun ones that are all over the map on what they post about (I like to read almost anything on Newsfromme no matter what subject Mark is writing about). But most of the blogs I read focus on a single topic or a given domain. And there I want to read all the posts — even the ones that occasionally stray off the main topic. Like, for example, when I read PVRblog.
I think the problem is even worse for some folks than Chris says. The number of interesting blogs is enormous and growing. Just ranking the articles won’t be enough for me. I need something else to help digest the blog posts.
The place where I think Chris is onto something is in this idea:
There is no variation in the sound. It’s like using all the colors of the rainbow at once. The result is white. Or playing all sounds everywhere at the same time. The result is noise.
That’s the thing that Steve and I find most interesting for Bscopes to work on. How to highlight the things of interest and separate them visually. You know… wheat from chaff… the forest from the trees… the baby from the bath water. (Maybe not that last one )
And what Chris says about variation is key to us as well. Size. Color. Shape. Direction. Anything to help you picture the conversations that are going on in the blogosphere. That’s what we think is needed. Some way to focus on the most interesting conversations and then join in.
Anyway. Back to the grind.
Filtering! Who’d have thought that the need for this capability would be felt so soon. But Richard MacManus’s post speaks to the need, and the absence, and the pain! The common notion of filtering just seems to bring me back to the same place, text, text, text. I need a picture that filters in more than one dimension at one time. Same service or not, filtering must deliver a benefit, not more of the same.
This is the reason why bscopeswas created. Stay tuned………..
