Bscopes Blog

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

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Bscopes is, first and foremost, about helping bloggers manage their information overload. We have seen that some of our users are already hitting the limits on their free Bscopes accounts.

Introducing Bscopes Paid Memberships

Today we are adding three new levels of Bscopes memberships: Bronze, Silver, and Gold. Of course, you can still continue to use Bscopes for free. You always will — that’s a promise. But, when you need more, now you can have more.Each membership level gives you more of the Bscopes capabilities you need:

• Larger feed subscription limits
• Bigger Bspaces with more feeds in each one
• More frequent updates of Bscopes and Bspaces
• Larger sized graphs
• Interactivity: click through Bscopes and Bspaces
• Ad Free pages

Additional Features To Come

More and more features are coming to Bscopes. As they are added, Bronze, Silver and Gold members will continue to get access to more of them with fewer limitations.

Simple Monthly Subscription

Signup for any Bscopes paid membership level in just 30 seconds. Bronze membership starts at $4.99 per month. Your credit card is billed automatically every month. And you can upgrade, downgrade or cancel at any time. There is no commitment; no contract.

Feedback, please!

As always, we are interested in knowing what you think. Please take a moment and post a comment on this post and let us know what you think about the new membership levels.

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As I keep reading more and more posts from overloaded bloggers, I’ve started thinking a bit more about what exactly the term overload means. Everyone seems to have a sense of feeling overwhelmed in common and complains that there are times when they can’t keep up with blogs via RSS.One big part of this is just the sheer quantity of blogs. Each blog you read leads you to other blogs. And those lead to other blogs. It never ends. Some of those make their way into your feed reader. And so the number of feeds you subscribe to keeps growing. The good news is that right now it feels different than having 500 cable TV stations with nothing on.A different part of this is the quantity of posts on that blog. Some blogs are hardly ever updated. Others are updated weekly or daily. Complicating this are those blogs that have multiple authors. So the total number of blog posts can be much larger than a single author blog.While the total number of posts matters, the frequency and regularity of updates do too. Ten posts in ten days is somehow different than ten posts in one day. It’s the “real-time” nature of the blogosphere. There’s an immediacy to an RSS update. It’s almost as though you can feel the posts growing stale in your queue of unread articles. Maybe it’s the knowledge that other people are commenting on the post. That a conversation is taking place that you haven’t yet joined.In the blogosphere, time matters.  The problem of overload is bad enough when you look at the producing end. It gets worse when something happens on the consuming side. Many people can manage to keep up with their feed reader as long as they are diligent at it. Just make sure to read a little every few hours, or every day. Count on the fact that most bloggers tend not to write as much on the weekend, so maybe then you’ll catch back up.Just don’t go on vacation without your iPhone or your laptop. Any slowdown in your regular pattern of reading feeds can cause an immediate pileup in your feedreader. It’s bad enough that some bloggers are even declaring RSS bankruptcy.To me, this is all about velocity. A combination of both quantity and time. Too many updates each day. Or the same amount of updates as any week, but no time to read them. Or worse… a busy news week just as you come down with the flu.I see the potential of a tool like a Bscope or a Bspace in managing that changing velocity. Giving an overwhelmed consumer an alternative to just marking thousands of articles as “read” in their feed reader. A chance, instead, to at least find the most interesting, relevant or important conversations in the blogosphere. And to join in those few before trying to go back to drinking from that continuous firehose we lovingly call the blogosphere.

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