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More on Conversations — Politics

It all started as a simple discussion about politics. A straight forward left-right dialog about current events and comments by and about Rush Limbaugh. When Brad said, I wonder if we can find a blog conversation about this topic. . . . .and there it was. Just a few clicks and voila! Right there in the middle of the Politics Bspace.

Bspace of Politics

As I said before, I had discovered (more like stumbled on) a conversation while looking at the Bscopes of several leadership blogs. So of course, I’m now looking for these kinds of cross-links deliberately in the various blogs on the Bscopes site.

It should be no surprise that I found the very blogs I tagged with ‘politics’, such as: Huffington , Andrew Sullivan, National Review, and Kudlow (in no particular order). But here’s the interesting part, I found new blogs I hadn’t known about, like European Democracy, Featherly, and EconLib that are present in the larger politics space tagged by other Bscopers with similar interests.

Some of these new blogs had posts related to the conversation I was reading and some didn’t, but I added them to my own Bspace. Now I’m watching their graphs daily and read only the posts of interest. In much the same way that Christophe points out in his article, the map shows what is included, what is nearby, and may even be an directional indicator.

Now, I have more stuff to argue with Brad about!

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Take a Tour

Tour Guide

“And we’re walking, and we’re walking, and we’re stopping.” — Dave (1993)

What is Always the Last Thing on a Software Project?

As experienced software developers, Steve and I feel we must conform to all geek stereotypes. In this case, it means that documentation comes last.

What Is Bscopes?

We keep getting the question from people (mainly our parents and spouses, but they are people too). So we put together a guided tour of the Bscopes site. Each section of the tour explains a set of the features of Bscopes. We also give samples of what you can do on Bscopes.

Our goal is go help new users get the most out of Bscopes. But, since we know how to use Bscopes, it’s a little difficult to pin down exactly what to explain and in how much detail.

Please take a look at the tour and leave a comment on this blog post letting us know what you think. Or what else you’d like to see added. Or subtracted. (multiplied? divided?) Just leave a comment to let us know that we aren’t just blogging into the wind.

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Weather Radar — What a Great Metaphor

Radar DomeNow why didn’t I think of that? Or better yet, why didn’t Steve think of that? (that’s the ticket… I’ll blame him!)

Christophe Deschamps has once again written a great blog post that clearly shows he gets what Bscopes is trying to do. But more than that, he has inspired us by coming up with another, different, description for our approach to visualizing the Blogosphere.

He compares a Bspace to a satellite weather map. What a great metaphor. We had been thinking of it and describing it in map like terms. But, more in an analogy to a map of the stars. Or some other large, dense kind of map.

Christophe discusses the patterns he sees in a Bspace. He likens them to weather patterns. I like this. We’ve previously written about types of Bscopes that we’d observed. But like Biologists before Carl Linnaeus, we haven’t yet reached the point where we have a good vocabulary or any kind of classification of what we see. We’d also discussed the Bspace patterns that appear, to us, to show conversations.

Christophe takes the analogy one step further. He’s been looking at how the Bspace patterns change each day (or multiple times a day depending on your Bscopes membership level). And he’s now starting to spot movements in these patterns — which he says remind him of changing weather patterns. More than that, he speculates that he might be able to learn to follow and spot these patterns even before they are fully developed.

It makes me wonder if this is what scientists felt like 150 or more years ago. When they first had the ability to communicate their observations about the atmosphere nearly instantaneously. So that they could predict the weather beyond just what they could see with their own eyes. Perhaps we are at the beginning with the Blogosphere. Maybe we can start to see patterns of conversation as they emerge and see the forest despite all the trees (talk about a painfully mixed metaphor there).Spindle Award

Over the past year or more, Steve and I have had conversations about adding a time dimension to our Bscopes and Bspaces. Something more than just the horizontal and vertical distribution of blog posts over time we have now. The Weather Radar Map analogy gives us new food for thought.

So… for his contribution to cutting through the clutter,  we hereby award Christophe our very first “Antique Receipt Spindle” Award. (For those too young to remember this once widely used organizing device, wikipedia, the font of all knowledge provides this useful article.) Christophe you may feel free to proudly display this award on the desktop or blog of your choice.

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RSS Overload, Blog Overload, Information Overload — It’s All Overload To Me

Overload!

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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Conversations in Bspaces

conversation213x141.jpgOne of the many uses for Bscopes is the discovery of what we call ‘Conversations’. Our use of the word is more similar to the way Technorati uses the phrase, than to the way that TechCrunch uses it. (Feel free to agree or disagree and add your own comments to this post. We could use a good flamewar over definitions… we haven’t had one since comp.lang.* got overrun by trolls).

We think of a blog conversation as multiple authors writing about the same topic, referring to each other by hypertext links in their posts. A while back, Jeremy Zawodny complained about having difficulty tracking these kind of conversations through the Blogosphere. It has not been easy.

Now, Bscopes can help discover conversations. A Bspace graph shows visually what can be difficult to see through the clutter of the text of the posts. The goal of a Bspace is to give you a birds-eye view of a part of the Blogosphere.

The Bspace below is a great example. I have three blogs tagged with ‘Leadership’:

Leadership Conversation

This Bspace clearly shows that two blogs cross-referencing each other, while the third is entirely separate. I had not been aware of this before. In fact, it was invisible to me until I created this Bspace.

Time now to start our own meta-conversation on the topic of conversations. Write a post and link to this one. (We’ll certainly graph that). Or leave a comment on this post. Or both. Or neither.

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Need More Bscopes? You Can Have It!

Bronze Silver and Gold User Levels

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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Organizing and Updating your Bscope’s Feeds

Visualizing Your Mental Blog Space

We’ve now created a single, central page for updating all of a subscription’s attributes. You can now organize and manage the feeds you’ve subscribed to in Bscopes. This gives you a kind of mental map of the space that represents your feeds

Getting Organized

A screen shot of the organization page is shown below. I’ll use numbers to guide you through the features. Number 1 Every RSS feed in your subscription will be listed down the page. Next to the feed title Number 2 is the current rating that you’ve given that blog. Want to change a rating? Just click on a star.

Oranziation Screen

And directly underneath each feed are the sets of tags that you’ve given each feed. To add, change or remove a tag for a feed, just click on the edit button that appears when you mouse over the feed Number 3. Changes are immediately reflected on the organization page through the magic of Ajax.

To remove a feed from this list, just click on the delete button on the left of the feed’s name Number 4. It will no longer appear in your list or your Bscopes and Bspaces. Of course, at any time, you can always add that feed or any other back into your list of feeds. You can get an idea of each blog’s popularity because the number of subscriber’s are shown in the far right column Number 5 of the table.

We have a few other ideas simmering on the burner. More importantly, though, we’d like to know what you think. Post comments here on the blog with your experiences organizing your feeds in Bscopes.

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A New Hope – A New Look

We have a whole new appearance with several new features to go a long with it. A new front page (uses fuzzy logic), a new Coverflow page, a new Bspace page, lots of tagging stuff, as well as the stunningly popular Gallery.

We’ll write about each one separately. For now, take a look and tell us what you think !

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Additional Features – Tags, Tabs and Top

one_of_many.jpg

During the supposedly quiet end of Summer, we’ve rolled out several new features to Bscopes.com. Here’s just a few things for you to enjoy:

  • We’ve simplified the main page to put the Bspace of the top 100 feeds and the gallery of each individual site’s Bscope on separate tabs.
  • We’ve integrated tags into the Bscope viewer page. If you are logged in when you are viewing a Bscope, you’ll see a new panel that lets you see your other feeds that have the same tag. From their you can do two things:
    • See the Bscopes for other feed with that same tag, or
    • See a dynamically created Bspace of your feeds with that tag — it’s your personal Bspace.
  • We changed the graph layout just a bit to clarify when outside links are to the top of the entire blog. This is shown by a new octagon symbol on the Bscope.

Look for more features every few weeks.

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Overload is More Than Just Quantity

Drinking from a hoseAs 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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