On Jan 14, 2009, at 8:58 AM, chasy wrote: > Speaking of tags...something I wish LJ had (and maybe they don't > because it would require too much database "energy" - I don't know > ya'll's fancy language for that ;)) is a function a lot of other sites > have - a tag cloud on the front page of the home site showing the most > popular tags being used by users. I find this feature a much easier > method of finding interesting content to read rather than searching by > interest. Is this a feature DW might implement someday? :) - Chasy
Oh, God, *everything* involving search and discovery is something we very much want to improve -- it's impossible to find anything on the site, pretty much, if you don't already know what you're looking for. Site search has always been one of those things that we wanted to include on LJ, but were stymied due to the complexity of the database queries involved -- it was very "expensive" in terms of database resources, because the LJ database was so freakin' huge. (IIRC, it was no more than a single order of magnitude less than Google's. And obviously, without all of Google's resources.) Ideally, what we want to do is improve tagging so that it's more flexible and usable, and what I personally want to do down the road is migrate the "memories" function (which is horribly, horribly broken and unusable) into something more like del.icio.us-style bookmarking, so that you could browse each user's bookmarks or browse all the things bookmarked on the site -- for instance, if you came to my journal and looked at my bookmark-memories, you'd see that I had a memory bookmark named "fic", and you could click on that bookmark tag and see other people's entries that I'd bookmarked and tagged "fic". This would be separate from my *journal* tags -- journal tags are a way to organize the contents of my journal, bookmarks would be a way to organize other people's entries I wanted to find again. My vision for this feature does include being able to see, for instance, "all of my watchlist's bookmarks by tag" (so I could go and see everything that people on my reading list had bookmarked), and then another tab for the second-degree (people watched by people I watched), and another tab for the whole site. I envision happy hours of noodling around the site and finding things that way ... Basically, site discovery (finding new content that you want to read) is a hard problem to solve, because it's very resource-intensive, but I very much want to improve it. I don't envision it being something we'll be able to do by open launch, but it's one of my major priorities for the third or fourth quarter that we're open. --D -- Denise Paolucci [email protected] Dreamwidth Studios: Open Source, open expression, open operations. Coming soon! _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
