Blog Chatter

As I’ve men­tioned ear­lier, I read a lot of feeds. By orga­niz­ing them in cat­e­gories, I can eas­ily get an idea of what field is hot. For exam­ple, yes­ter­day, upon look­ing at Blog­lines, my RSS aggre­ga­tor, I knew that some­thing impor­tant was hap­pen­ing (or not, con­sid­er­ing that it was April 1st) in the search space as the feeds I had clas­si­fied as search-related seem to have more than the usual num­ber of entry. I call this con­cept blog chatter.

Over the past few weeks, with the 9/11 com­mis­sion run­ning its pub­lic inter­views, the word chat­ter has come back to the fore­front. Basi­cally, it means that the noise is increas­ing. Thanks to the imme­di­ate or almost imme­di­ate updates given by RSS feeds, it is now pos­si­ble to track what the blo­gos­phere is talk­ing about. Of course, this is hardly news to users of Tech­no­rati, Blogdex, Popdex, Day­pop or sim­i­lar ser­vices. How­ever, one thing that is miss­ing is a graph­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion if this chat­ter, sim­i­lar to what Newsmap used to do.

News­fil­ter does an inter­est­ing job of cre­at­ing instant lay­out based on news chat­ter in the Google News ser­vice but I’ve yet to see any­thing sim­i­lar for the blog world. This is where I go back to the sub­ject of cat­e­go­riza­tion in RSS feeds. If we could define some agreed upon level of cat­e­go­riza­tion (or the skele­ton of one) and/or dic­tio­nary of syn­onyms in the cat­e­gory space, we could start cre­at­ing broad bas­kets of feeds. Feed­ster is try­ing to do some of that group­ing with their con­cept of Feed­pa­pers but I would like to ques­tion whether this task has to be a man­ual one.

If there were an agree­ment between blog authors as to some stan­dard con­ven­tions in terms of defin­ing a basic cat­e­go­riza­tion scheme (or using an exist­ing one: after all, there are a num­ber of cat­e­go­riza­tions schemes avail­able, some pri­vately held (like the Dewey Dec­i­mal Sys­tem), and oth­ers in the pub­lic domain (like the Library of Con­gress MARC for­mat). I am not advo­cat­ing one over another but I do thing that this type of orga­ni­za­tion could be useful.

Once feeds are more orga­nized, one could gen­er­ate appli­ca­tions that would pump out not just list of links that were pop­u­lar but also pro­vide visual map­pings of what’s impor­tant in the blog world. I know it sounds far-fetched but sim­i­lar attempts at infor­ma­tion orga­ni­za­tion were made in the late 1990s. Con­sid­er­ing Moore’s law, we should now have the pro­cess­ing power for those more processor-intensive appli­ca­tions to run. The idea here is to be able to get a set of visual cues relat­ing to what sub­jects are hot or not. Look­ing into a 3D space, one could map num­ber of indi­vid­ual men­tions on one axis, num­ber of sites men­tion on another, and increase or decrease on a third one. Color could also be used to indi­cate the speed of increase or decrease in the men­tions. All this would allow to get a quick glance at what “chat­ter” is occur­ring. Click­ing on a resource would then expose richer data. It seems all the pieces are there to build such an appli­ca­tion. My knowl­edge of 3D inter­face design is lim­ited, how­ever, so I can’t build it myself. Any­one out there cares to do it?