Who has a life?
As you might have seen over at our BlogBridge blog, we are experimenting with a new visualization of blog postings, right inside BlogBridge. I've taken to calling this the Kleppner Widget as it was invented by Paul and Andrew Kleppner who have been contributing some cool stuff of late.
This is a snippet from a pre-release build of BlogBridge:
What you are looking at is a display of 4 Feeds (Dan Gillmor, Joho the Blog, Emergence Marketiong and Pito's Blog) All the way over to the right you can see the visualization.
Here's how you read it: From left to right, each column is 1 day, starting today, yesterday, and back to 1 week ago. The number of dots in the column corresponds to the number of new articles or posts on that day.
Hey look at that: David and Dan are posting like crazy, Francois pretty good, and I am the laggard.
We aren't sure yet whether this new visualization is the cats pajamas or too gimicky but we are quite fond of it. It will probably make it in the very first weekly release after BlogBridge 2.0 ships early next week.
What do you think? Too much information, or a nice compact summary of how active a blog is? And by the way, should the days run left to right (as they do today) or right to left?
Technorati Tags: blogbridge, visualization, UI
Comments
I like it a lot. We put a little graph like that in Picasa that maps your picture-taking activity. IMHO the past should definitely be on your left and the future on your right.
Posted by: Reed Sturtevant | August 12, 2005 09:06 PM
Yep, I think so too, left-to-right is much better. Also, it might be great to mark today's column with some color to identify it somehow.
Posted by: Aleksey Gureev | August 13, 2005 02:38 AM
I like the concept of unread marks reflecting the dimension of time, and for the Kleppners I have nothing if not deep respect. But something's wrong here. I am having a hard time figuring out under what circumstances this information is going to help me make any choices. If it went back further than a week, I might use it to decide that a feed is too active for me, or too inactive, and therefore unsubscribe. But if it doesn't help me make choices, it's eye candy, and it's too prominent.
Posted by: David Coletta | August 13, 2005 07:43 AM
Cool!
I do find it to be helpful information. I'm more likely to read a blog with lots of posts, but that's just me. There are certainly some blogs that I read that post highly infrequently.
So, why not make the display a preference? That way, David C can turn it off. And maybe even let those who read right to left flip the arrow of time. (And please please can we optionally turn off the star display? Pretty please?)
Posted by: David Weinberger | August 13, 2005 11:11 AM
This is very cool!!! I too would do left to right...
Posted by: francois | August 13, 2005 03:41 PM