Disclaimer: I was sent a review copy by Chris Anderson for free on the promise to write about the book, because the Bscopes business model is one of those described in this book. Neither Chris nor his publisher dictated the content of our review.

Further dislaimer: As a living example, all of the links to the book on Amazon are affiliate links. So, if after reading my review you want to buy a copy of Free: The Future of a Radical Price, then please use one of our links to buy the book on Amazon. That way Bscopes will earn a little revenue while providing you this blog post for free.

In this book, Chris Anderson traces through the many meanings of the term “free” especially as they apply to the Internet. As a business book, it’s a nice read. I was able to work my way though it over the course of a few days in my (copious) spare time. It clocks in at around 275 pages and alternates between fascinating reading where you want to pour over every word, and repeated information where I felt like a could skip ahead to the next section.

One of the things this book does best is to serve almost as a history text book. It documents, describes and catalogs the different kids of free. A detailed analysis is provided on the 20th century model(s) of free that apply mostly to the world of atoms versus the 21st century model(s) of free that apply to the world of bits. It serves as a great compilation of the early days of free on the Internet right up through Web 2.0. This is invaluable in proving wrong those who say “it can’t be done” by showing how it already has been done. There is a wonderfully detailed section that reproduces many of the most common arguments against “free” that have already appeared and Chris refutes them point-by-point.

The book is a business and case studies text that documents how people have made money using “free”. In addition to a ton or references and citations, Chris’ book does a nice job of tying together information provided in other books that are related including Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational and Seth Godin’s Unleashing the Ideavirus. For example, he uses Dan’s description of the difference between 1¢ and 0¢ to help explain the uniqueness of free. He also provides detailed information on multiple “case studies” that break down the specific pattern used by that example product or service to earn money using “free”.

Where the book seems to fall down is when it acts as an economics textbook. The analysis and estimates of various market sizes of free are so full of qualifiers, assumptions and weasel words as to render them nearly useless. This effort weakens an otherwise useful section on concepts such as reputation and attention. The shallow and incomplete nature of this part of the book takes away from the thorough style in the other sections. I think it might have worked better to simply describe the incomplete nature of what is known for certain in these areas and then move on.

Much of the book’s content has already been made available online for free. If you’ve been reading Chris’ blog over the past few years, then you’ll have seen the information as it evolved. Even now you can go back and scour those posts and put together the information yourself from the original pieces. Or, if you go to Chris’ blog you’ll find some recent posts describing all the ways you can get an electronic version of the book for free.

In true meta fashion, there are then three markets that this book appeals to and several ways that Chris attempts to monetize each one:

1. His faithful blog readers: They’ve already consumed much of the content:
   • So they have no need to buy the book unless they are willing to trade $ for their time and convenience.
   • Or unless they view the book at a souvenir that they can keep and display
   • Or as something they wish to lend or give to others
2. New people who heard about the concept and who have the time to obtain the info:
   • These people are also willing to trade time to save $. For example, college students.
   • They can find an audio version as well as a written version for free on the Internet. So not much revenue, but he’ll gain exposure.
3. New people who heard about the concept but lack the time to deal with obtaining all the info:
   • These folks are willing to pay for the convenience of having it all in one place.
   • They may also be willing to pay for having it in hard copy book form for reading away from the computer screen.

As a content creator, this experiment neatly summarizes the two trade-offs of this free pricing model: A bigger pie (audience), where 2/3 of the audience may obtain the content for free versus and contribute no revenue versus a smaller pie where all of the audience brings in revenue. The first case’s bigger pie is due to the word of mouth, attention and reputation gains that giving away the content for free brings. Plus, secondary revenue streams are increased as well. I’m sure that Chris will make a tidy sum through speaking engagements based on the book’s (and his) reputation.

Free: The Future of a Radical Price shows itself as an example of Chris’ adage that to compete against something that is free, you must offer something of greater value. In my opinion, this book does that. I’ll be spending much time over the next few months looking to this book for new ideas on how Bscopes can continue to make money (we still to pay our mortgages and deal with college costs) while we provide a useful product where much if it is free.

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Your current feed reader is full of unread items. You’re hesitant to subscribe to any more feeds because you can’t keep up with your existing subs. Maybe you’ve even abandoned feeds altogether.

Fever takes the temperature of your slice of the web and shows you what’s hot.

Users of Bscopes and readers of the Bscopes Blog may find this familiar. This is great. For too long now, we’ve felt like the only ones trying to do something radical with the existing feed reader approach. Shaun Inman seems to be a kindred spirit. Someone who is also frustrated trying to keep up with the information overload. It is good to see that he’s trying to do something about it too.

Dan Romero at TechCrunch has a nice write up about all this too which expresses this hope:

Fever is a hot new RSS reader that aims to cure “second inbox syndrome, unread item guilt, and unbold elbow.” In other words, the common plights of the modern RSS power user.

I’ve heard the first two terms, but “unbold elbow” is a new one. I like that term, and if you don’t mind too much Dan, I might just use it from time to time. I hope that having more people focused on solving the problem of Blog Overload for those RSS Power Users will help to let those overwhelmed users know that help is available to them.

Good luck to Shaun and to all of us out there trying to keep from drowning in this sea of RSS feeds.

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Nooooooooooooo!

So close yet so far. Farhad is in pain. That I understand. But to try and solve the pain all he could do as to cut off the use of his only tool. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Then the conversation erupted. Other folks started to chime in.

On Slate’s forums, the usual suggestions were made for things like filters by people like Horatio Nelson. Over at Mashable, Ben Parr joined in to ask the musical question “Do You Use an RSS Reader?” And his informal poll currently has 72% of his readers who use one “all the time”. Just after that, Steven Cahill wrote a blog post proclaiming that “RSS is Not Dead“. His conclusion, “Give me RSS any day.”

Once again I see the same need to combat Blog RSS Overload. And, I see the same frustrations and proposals. When people ask why we created Bscopes, this is exactly what drove us.

But, I don’t want to just go on and on summarizing this problem. I want to try and point out to Farhad, Ben, Steven and all the others suffering out there that we think we can help. Not to replace your trusty RSS feed reader, but to supplement it.

In Farhad’s original Slate Magazine post, there was this plea:

Moreover, I hated the software’s bland interface; when you read blogs through RSS, you’re only getting text, not design, so every blog looks like every other blog. But I didn’t want Gawker to look like the New Republic; I needed a visual difference, in the same way that I want the National Enquirer to look distinct from the New York Times.

That is the essence of the Bscopes approach. A picture, not more text. A visualization, not simply filtering.

For example, here is a Bspace (a picture of multiple blogs) that I added based on Farhad’s initial post.

Rather than get overloaded and then just hit “mark all read”, try picturing a slice of the blogosphere using Bscopes. Check out one blog. Or a group of blogs related by a tag. Or even a Bspace of all the blogs you read.

Use Bscopes to give you an overview of what is happening. You can check out the relationships at any given minute betweeen blogs. Or, over time, look for changing weather patterns in the blogosphere (a la Christophe).

But the key thing is to not give up. Don’t kill your feed reader. After all, a mime (type=”application/rss+xml”) is a terrible thing to waste.

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Our Fundamental Business Rule

For a Web 2.0 startup, IONSHO, the fundamental thing is to be prepared to move at the speed of the Internet. No matter what your size. It’s not like dog years, it’s worse. This is a direct contrast to how we spent 25 or 30 years in the product and services industry. 18 – 24 month product cycles were common there. On the web, people talk about 60 or 90 day cycles. We disagree. We say that a continuous approach to product development is required. Product creation both drives and is driven by the business needs and goals. Our new name proposal: The Escher Business Product Model. Let’s be clear here, if you are Microsoft or Oracle, then you do what you want. When you are two guys in your garage you are much more constrained. This model is based on that situation and those constraints. If you already have VC funding, you can stop reading now.

Constraints Of Small Companies (Two Guys in a Garage)

Many people view the lack of resources as a hindrance, we see it as an advantage.  Things that used to cost a lot of money and take a lot of time and expertise are now able to be obtained for a few dollars a month with just a few clicks of the mouse. The services available on the Internet provide enough leverage to enable an entire company be built and launched in a few days. And then continuously evolved over nights and weekends. There were two books that helped to reinforce this Escher Business Product Model.  Seth Godin’s Purple Cow and Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start. Both provided vision and helped us formulate our ideas. We had a product idea and Purple Cow helped us understand that such a unique idea could be successful and was an advantage. Guy’s book reinforced our notion that two guys could bootstrap the entire operation. This approach came with constraints:

• Reach Exceeds Grasp: We couldn’t build even a fraction of our vision for Bscopes up front
• No Users: We couldn’t spend months building hype with some secret “invitation only” private beta test period
• Can’t Wait: We couldn’t wait two years to release version 2.0 — improvements would have to come quickly and continuously
• No Revenue: We couldn’t wait until the site was “done” to provide enough value to attract a user base

This brought us to the understanding that we had to have a continuous development and release model to turn our constraints into advantages.

Build a little. Build a lot.

Bscopes couldn’t afford to be wrong in a big way. But we could afford to be wrong in a small way. And wrong a lot of times. As long as we learned and grew. We have a vision of what we want. One key to turning these business constraints into product advantages is to ensure that we bound all feature investments.  This means breaking our big ideas into small pieces. Incrementally building and releasing them. And then, getting feedback on them ASAP. This is not possible when it takes 18-24 months to go from v1.0 to v2.0.

You Can’t Always Drink Your Own Bathwater

From the Tuned In guys and the product management blog of Steve Johnson, we developed a better understanding of where we were right and where we were wrong. And, more importantly, that sometimes it is not relevant if we are right or wrong: “Your opinion, while interesting, is irrelevant”. This became our mantra and we use it to beat each other up on a regular basis. Part of the juggling act in Escher Business Product Model is to provide the user with enough capabilities so that they can use the product and give feedback, while not over-investing time in the development of any feature. The feature might be rejected, so keep sunk costs small. The key to doing this is to break everything that needs user feedback into mini-functionality releases. It’s like Einstein said, “Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.” It’s a continuous effort to maintain the discipline of breaking multi-month cycles into week or two features. And to make sure that week or two long features are supplemented by a number of even smaller tweaks, improvements, and bug fixes. An hour here improving the clarity of one window based on feedback from Twitter. An hour there clarifying the structure of the Bscope graph based on email responses. Continuous small investments, continuously released, yield big results for the users.

Rules For Small Startups

1. Develop and release continuously: Don’t go a week without some changes.
2. Keep time investments small: Be prepared to abandon ideas that don’t work.
3. Get some feedback: Release to the community and listen to what they think.

This is our approach to Web 2.0 development. We are very interested in your approaches or thoughts on our Escher based approach. Please leave some comments below.

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There was a great crowd who was full of interesting questions and suggestions. They gave us some much needed praise and feedback on Bscopes. It is fun to get to have a real-time dialogue to exchange concepts and ideas.

Next time, though, Steve is considering wearning his high heels too!

Everyone in the Baltimore-DC area should keep an eye out for their next Forum. Their newletter is at www.loyola.edu/loyolacomputes. They are building a great new Software Engineering Graduate program. We are looking forward to participating again in the future.

Also, a big shout out to “He who must not be named” (who last appeared on Bscopes a year ago in this post) for making a special guest appearance in the audience. We’ll be watching for him this summer at a nearby theater.

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Steve and I have been invited to do a presentation tomorrow at the Loyola College Advanced Technology Forum. Our topic is: “Bscopes: Visually Organize The Blogosphere”. (I’m sure that came as a surprise)

We’ll be discussing what Bscopes is all about and conducting a live demonstration of the Bscopes site.

Here’s the basic info:

Tuesday, April 28, 7:30 pm to 9:00 pm
Loyola College – Columbia Graduate Center
8890 McGaw Road, Columbia, MD 21045

Admission is free and they are even promising refreshements.

So anyone in the DC or Baltimore area is welcome to stop by tomorrow at 7:30 pm and get a peek at the two men behind the curtain.

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I realized that I have one more request to ask of everyone who uses Bscopes and reads the Bscopes blog and of the Bscopes community at large.

Any of you who have your own blog — and I suspect that many of you that are overloaded reading blogs are also writing blogs — check out the feature on Bscopes that lets you embed a Bscope widget on your own blog.

You can find it at www.bscopes.com/widget. Or from any page of Bscopes by clicking on the Share button. The widget will update each time your blog’s Bscope updates.

If you’d like to see an example of what this looks like, check out  Richard Peirano’s blog and see his Bscope. Or just look at ours in our sidebar. Gotta love that dog food (munch, munch, munch).

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It’s no secret that I’m a member of the Seth Godin Tribe. So when I read in his latest blog post that he going to give me “the secret of the new marketing”, I got all excited.

It sounds simple. Just find ten people. That’s even easier than last year when Kevin Kelly told me to find 1000 True Fans.

Seth tells me that Steve and I don’t have to “launch”. We don’t have to create press releases or have a big release party. We don’t have to buy a superbowl ad with the VC money that we don’t have. (I think our wives will be glad to know that).

This makes sense. And, then,  I realize that Seth is — once again — writing directly to me. This is  what we’ve been doing here at Bscopes. We have:

• Figured out our passion: visualization and web 2.0
• Seen a problem that needs solving: Blog and RSS overload
• Built a product to meet the need: Bscopes
• Started telling other people with the same need: in the Bscopes Blog and via word of mouth

Then, if we follow this approach, as Seth outlines, then our idea spreads. And, our business grows. “Not as fast as you want”, Seth cautions. “But faster than you could ever imagine”. I hope so. (“From his lips to Gods ears” is what my Grandmother would have said if she heard him).

I believe that we have started. That there are at least ten people out there reading this blog — there are certainly a ton more than that using Bscopes.

What Else Should We Do?

While I’m sure I could just sit back and wait, that doesn’t sound exactly right to me. And, I remember that as I kid I was told that if I didn’t ask for what I wanted, didn’t speak up, I would never get it.

So I’ll tell you what I want (why am I hearing the Spice Girls in the back of my head right now?)…

I would like the ten of you who have begun to fall in love with Bscopes to go tell someone. Or ten someones. If you have a blog (like our first fan Christophe) then please write a blog post about Bscopes.

That’s it. That’s all. Just help spread the word. With your help, we can keep building Bscopes into the kind of a business that can do something about the problem of information overload. And never forget… you were there at the beginning.

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Matthew Hurst over at the Data Mining blog wrote an interesting post last week. The topic is one that we have written about here on the Bscopes blog: Information Overload. But more specifically than that, he talks about user interface… about visualization… about the stuff near and dear to our hearts.

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I had spent the past weekend plus (72 hours or so) actually living life. You know… writing code for Bscopes. Chauffeuring the kids around to Tae Kwon Do, etc. Finally watching the hour of Battlestar Galactica recorded on my HD TiVo before the series goes off the air. Not that it wasn’t a good weekend… it was. But, not once did I have time to sit down in front of Google Reader.

When I did have time to try and catch up, there was, as you’d expect, a massive RSS Overload. And I did, as you’d expect, use Bscopes to help manage it. Like Steve posted about last week, I found conversations in the Blogosphere. That was good. Definitely helpful. But, I still wasn’t in Blog reading heaven.

What Went Wrong

Part of my problem was using Bscopes equally on all the Blogs in my feed reader. However, they really weren’t all the same. I think I am dealing with several different categories of blogs in my feed reader:

• Must Read Blogs — The ones that have two attributes in common:
  1. The author almost  always writes something brilliant, or funny, or insightful.
  2. The author doesn’t post more than a few times a day or even just a few times a week.

  (Here let me share a little link love with bloggers who, I’m sure, don’t need it like Seth Godin or Mark Evanier).
  These are blogs I know I’ll fully consume no matter how far behind I get.

• No Need To Read Blogs — The ones that I never intend to read 100%. I do read some articles on these blogs, but not most of the articles. Two examples of these are:
  1. News articles. I get mine from Google News. But CNN, the Washington Post or any other set of headlines show the same pattern. They publish a ton of RSS posts each day (ton ≈ hundreds) and the posts almost never link out to anything. Do other blogers link in to them? Sometimes.
  2. Deal of the day sites. I have one for Amazon deals and also DealMac. I hardly ever buy, but do check to see if some amazing bargain shows up. Again, links aren’t really a big deal here. Usually the only one is to the deal itself.

  For these type of feeds, I can scan them by with putting Google Reader into list mode (where all I see is the post’s title in a compact list). That’s all the info I need to decide if I read it or skip it. My biggest problem is an emotional one… I just need to get past that nagging feeling that I’m missing something when I skip over things. It’s the completest in me that needs to collect 100% of something. To be black and white rather than gray.

•  Love/Hate Relationship Blogs — This is the more complicated category. Somethings I love and hate about some blogs I try and read:
  • Brilliant writing: I’ve found blogs that say something profound, insightful, or useful. But not always. Maybe not even most times. The most frustrating ones are the ones that are brilliant just often enough to keep me from dropping them, but which have many articles I don’t like at all.
  • Group blogs: I’ve found blogs where some of the articles are great. And where others stink. And then I notice that it’s because there are 3 or 4 or even 10 people writing on the blog. It gets even more frustrating when no one person is consistently interesting, but the blog is interesting overall. The MakeUseOf blog is like this. Sometimes this blog has the most amazing and useful stuff; but it depends on who is writing the post and what they are writing about.
  • Specialized news from a fire hose: I’ve always loved movies and TV. And as a certified geek (I can still name way too many trivial details about ST:TOS and ST:TNG) I find sites like AICN to be wonderful sources of info on what is out now and coming soon. But even though the site’s topic is focused, it still covers too many things I that I don’t care about (I never did like Buffy or Firefly, so sue me). And it still publishes way too frequently to consume. TechCrunch is another example of this. Sometimes it is wonderful entrepreneurial and tech info. Other times it’s just Mike Arrington ranting. But no matter what it publishes a ton of posts every day. I want to read it all but sometimes can’t keep up.

  These are the type of feeds where my Google Reader fails me. The volume of posts per day combined with the number of blogs that I have a love/hate relationship with is just too big. If I miss a day or two then I can’t catch up and read them all.

What To Do

I’m coming to the conclusion that the most fertile progress with Bscopes will be found by concentrating on this third kind of blog and not the other two. I think I need a few more tools out of Bscopes:

• Sort feeds into some big piles — Some way of taking the full set of feeds and grouping them so I can focus on just the ones that need Bscopes’ help the most.
• A way to focus on a subset —To designate a smaller subset of all the feeds. I’ve got tags. Tags are good. But I’m talking about subsetting based on how I want to treat the feeds and how I want to search, sift, graph, and visualize them. Not based on their subject matter.
• A way to zoom back out and look at the big picture  — To see the way that the winds are blowing (to use Christophe’s metaphor). To find the interesting conversations. To see the popular posts that are linked the most.
• A way to zoom in and understand the details —to be able to see the individual posts, headlines (and maybe even some text) for the elements of a conversation in the blogosphere. So that I can decide if it truly is interesting and should be read or should be skipped.

I guess I need to go now and start working on those tools and some others. Now that I’m starting to figure out what it is I want out of Bscopes. (Who knew eating your own dog food could be tasty?)

Of course, there is the possibility that I’m completely wrong. And, there is the strong probability that if I am, Steve will tell me quite quickly. But all you Bscopes users are also reading a ton of blogs. So… you tell me… what else do we need to help you cut through the clutter? The “post a comment” button is just a few pixels away.

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