Archive

Ideas on a Startup Camp for Entrepreneurs

Published by brad on March 25, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

meatballs_sm.jpgOver at calacanis.com, Jason Calacanis just asked for reactions to his proposal for a new conference aimed at startups. This seems like a great idea.

And, speaking for both Steve and myself, I say “we are in” (and why not… should Steve actually speak for himself? Can’t I play Penn to his Teller?).

I like the general list of goals and approaches that are listed. The price being free to cheap is, certainly, necessary given the nature of a startup. And while I’m happy to put in as much of my time, I do wonder about the location. A remote location to promote the goal of intimacy seems logical. And I’ve seen this kind of retreat work well in the past. But I would like to know a bit more about the logistics and travel costs ($$ and time both). I also like the idea mentioned by Patrick J of holding the event over a long weekend.

I’d like to see the event focus on a mixture of aspects and issues faced by a (Web 2.0) startup and not just any one area:

  • Technology: The non-obvious scaling problems beyond the personal experience of the technical founders. I’m not talking about php coding or writing html or tweaking blogging software. I’m thinking about issues of how and when to scale the server setup. Options for hosting providers. The stuff that others have already learned the hard way.
  • Marketing: How to get the word out. What kind of things could we tweak about Bscopes to make it more likely to go viral? Certainly attending this kind of startup camp would, itself, be a big contribution.
  • Business: We’d be very interested to discuss different revenue models with other folks. For example, freemium vs just ad supported. Use of Google AdSense as compared to other advertising approaches.

Anyway… I’m sure I’ll have more ideas the more I think about this. But for now I’ve got to get back to paying the bills…

If you enjoyed this post, then make sure you subscribe to the Bscopes RSS Feed.

Lots of Great Ways to Visualize Information

Published by brad on March 19, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Paper StackEarlier in the week I stumbled upon a blog post by Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb.com on the topic of Best Tools for Visualization. Wow, what a feast of info!

I’d seen a few of these before. Including the ones for Digg and YouTube. There were a ton of others that I’d never heard of.

I spent more time than I really had available reading the post and exploring the different sites Sarah points to. So don’t click on the link above unless you either don’t have a deadline or are in need of a good way to procrastinate.

Of course, I can’t look at all of those sites without getting inspired. So now Steve and I have an even larger list of possible new features to add to Bscopes. Our site is, of course, too new to have made this list, so I’ll ping them and point them to some of the Bscopes of blogs that we’ve made.

That’s enough for tonight…. gotta go add more features…

If you enjoyed this post, then make sure you subscribe to the Bscopes RSS Feed.

More Interesting Things to Do With Your RSS Feeds

Published by brad on March 11, 2008 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

RSS Road SignA very interesting post popped up in my RSS reader today. I found it thanks to a post by Tamar Weinberg over at Lifehacker. That pointed me to the blog makeuseof.com, which I hadn’t been reading, but now have added to my reader. Over at makeuseof.com Aibek put up an entry entitled 14 “OTHER” Ways to Use RSS Feeds. Where “other” means something beyond reading them in your RSS reader.

This made for a great read. Many of the things listed there I knew about, but several of them were new. Like the RSS to SMS messages bridge called Pingie. I don’t think I’d want Engadget on my cell phone, but a vanity feed from Google or Technorati for Bscopes…. Hmmm…. You never get too old for instant gratification, do you?

I think Steve and I will have to drop them a note and ask them to take a look at how we view RSS feeds as visual Bscopes. I think that might qualify as an “interesting” thing to do with your RSS feed. What do you think? As always, I’m looking forward to your comments.

And now, back to writing some code…

If you enjoyed this post, then make sure you subscribe to the Bscopes RSS Feed.

Two Types of Bscopes

Published by brad on March 6, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Apples and Oranges

As I was browsing through many of the Bscopes that we generate each day I started to notice a pattern. Although each individual Bscope looks different — because each blog is different — I was seeing similarities in the pictures.

I quickly found two big categories of Bscopes:

  1. Single black line graphs
  2. “Blue Cloud” graphs

Ok. What to make of all of this? I don’t totally know. Let’s look at some examples and do some compare and contrast — you take apples and I’ll take oranges. (Click on the Bscopes to see each one larger in a separate window.)

Single Black Line Graphs

Daring Fireball Bscope Wired News Bscope Ars Technia Bscope
Bscope of the Daring Fireball blog Bscope of the Wired News: Top Stories blog Bscope of the Ars Technica blog

The line of connected black nodes (circles) visually shows each new blog post in chronological order. It’s the backbone of any blog’s RSS feed. But, on these Bscopes, there are no other links from any post. That means that each of these blog’s posts doesn’t contain any outgoing links (<a href="">) in the post.

Then there’s a cluster of green nodes all linking to a single red node. This pattern shows other web sites (the green nodes) that contain a link to this blog’s main page (that’s the red node) — shallow linking only to the main URL.

I’ve seen this pattern repeated in several very popular blogs and it seems to be consistent over time. Even as the individual blog entries change the blog’s overall style.

If you take a closer look at one of these RSS feeds either on our site or in your newsreader, the main thing you’ll notice about these “black line” blogs are partial RSS feed blogs. While the full blog post might contain outgoing links, the partial feed usually doesn’t. Single black line graphs provide a quick visual indication that a partial RSS feed is being subscribed to.

“Blue Cloud” Graphs

Solutions Watch Bscope Mashable Blog Bscope Gaping Void Bscope
Bscope of the Solutions Watch blog Bscope of the Mashable blog Bscope of the Gaping Void blog

On this type of Bscope, there is still the same backbone of Blog posts — a central line of connected black nodes. These blogs also embed links to other websites in each blog post. These are shown by a blue arrow connected to a blue node. Links to previous posts on the same blog are shown by arrows between the black nodes. This style of Bscope is characterized by the large number of links on each blog post. For now, I’m calling this a “blue cloud” graph.

In addition, the green nodes (other websites) seen in the other style of Bscope are present here too. But in the “blue cloud” graph I’ve noticed that the links are not only to the top level of the blog, but are also directly linking to individual blog posts — deep linking directly into the site. This makes the resulting Bscope more complex due to all the interconnections.

And sometimes, these other websites are linking to older posts that are no longer present in the blog’s RSS feed. We show those older posts as additional red nodes on the Bscope.

And this means?

I don’t entirely know. Here’s what I can tell already…

Clearly these two types of Bscopes are different. To me, it there are certainly some simple Bscopes and some complex Bscopes. Or linear Bscopes and “flowering” Bscopes. I don’t know. Maybe Steve will come up with a better name.

Having these Bscopes is already giving me the ability to categorize my RSS feeds. Now, at a glance, I can tell which partial RSS feeds I’m subscribed to. So I’m already happy with the fact that Bscopes are letting me gain an insight into the set of blogs that I’m reading and apply that to each new blog I consider adding to my feed reader. This is a first step in helping me to “cut through the clutter” and that gets to the heart of what Steve and I want Bscopes to do.

Plus, the “blue cloud” graphs lead me to believe that there may be deeper interconnections between blogs that Bscopes can reveal.

I don’t think I know enough to make any quality judgments at this point. I don’t know that the Bscopes help to tell me good or bad. Or interesting or boring. Or any other adjectives that I can find. Perhaps you agree. Perhaps not. Either way, let us know. We’d love to see any and all comments here on the blog and get your opinions on the different Bscopes and their possible meanings.

If you enjoyed this post, then make sure you subscribe to the Bscopes RSS Feed.

Up and Running

Published by brad on February 28, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Well after too much time spent huddled over our computers we are thrilled to announce that bscopes.com has now gone live.

Our initial release is available for blog readers everywhere.  The first set of Bscopes is a set of 100 popular blogs. We provide a Bscope of each blog and update it daily as the blogosphere changes. In addition you can also see a sample composite Bscope of the entire set of 100 blogs.

And, if one particular site is of interest to you… or if you happen to own one of these 100 popular blogs (hint, hint) the you might find the Bscope Widget of interest.

We are glad to be out and available. Please let us know what you think of the new Bscopes site either by posting a comment here on the blog or by dropping us a line.

If you enjoyed this post, then make sure you subscribe to the Bscopes RSS Feed.

Like he said…..

Published by steveg on February 20, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Lots of GraphsWe stumbled across an interesting post from Jesse on the O’Reilly Radar Blog that uses an interesting visualization technique to graph words used by presidential candidates(New York Times article)

Again, it’s the birds-eye view makes things visible that were hindered by the mass of the content. In this case the words of dozens of candidates during many hours of speeches get compiled into a single graph. Applause to NYT (and thanks to Jesse for pointing it out) for employing a similar approach to cutting through the clutter !

If you enjoyed this post, then make sure you subscribe to the Bscopes RSS Feed.

What Does It Mean…..

Published by steveg on January 29, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Light Bulb Goes On

I was gonna write about something else (like how to read a bscope) but I had this idea/question…….

We’ve been working on getting these graphs finished and running when I looked at the wallpaper view of the top100 from a few weeks ago, and then at the current view of the same top100 and they are different!

Wallpaper of 100 Blogs 100 Blogs 080129
Before After

Yes, of course they are supposed to be different, because as each blog changes, so does its graph. But the colors are different. Why is there so much more green? Green nodes on a bscope represent incoming links to a blog from another website. So… over time more sites are linking to these blogs.

What conclusions do we draw from the two graphs? We, B and S, are studying the two and scratching our heads (no wonder there’s no hair left) and we’re thinking…….. not only will the shapes of the bscope change with new posts, but the colors and interconnections will change as well.

The ability to see the entire set of blogs (call it a bspace?) or even multiple bspaces lets you ask the question of what is changing in the blogosphere. This is the kind of question that a birds-eye-view causes that just can’t be seen when using a traditional text blog reader.

That’s because you can’t cut through the clutter of the text.

More work to do!

If you enjoyed this post, then make sure you subscribe to the Bscopes RSS Feed.

Sharing the wealth on del.icio.us

Published by brad on January 5, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

del.icio.us logoIf 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.

If you enjoyed this post, then make sure you subscribe to the Bscopes RSS Feed.

Visualizing a Blog — Why Graph At All?

Published by brad on December 21, 2007 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

Bird Eye ViewHi. 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).

Wallpaper of 100 Blogs

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….

If you enjoyed this post, then make sure you subscribe to the Bscopes RSS Feed.

Complex Filtering Wanted at Bscopes Blog

Published by steveg on March 16, 2007 in Uncategorized. 2 Comments

Frustrated

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………

If you enjoyed this post, then make sure you subscribe to the Bscopes RSS Feed.