On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 02:56:51PM -0500, [email protected] wrote: > > On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 9:43 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > >> If my interests were judged by my tags and their frequency, it would > >> appear that I am absolutely fascinated by memes and have never heard > >> of speculative fiction other than Harry Potter. So merging my > >> interests with my tags probably isn't gonna work too well. > > > > Supposing one were able to cherrypick interests from tags? Say, choose > > up to 150 (using LJ's number) of one's favorite tags for display as > > interests, with the option to helpfully sort by frequency of use when > > selecting. > > > > That might not work so well in some cases, however, because I am > > fairly sure that there are things that I am interested in (reading > > about, thinking about, talking about in comments) and have listed as > > LJ interests that I've never posted about or created tags for on my > > own. > > Yes, but the whole point of interests is to find people who use their > journal to talk about things you find interesting, too. What does it > matter to someone looking up journals they might want to watch for posts > about, say, Italian Opera, that you like Italian Opera if you never > actually post anything about it? A few comment threads here and there is > generally not enough to get me to want to watch someone's journal, if I'm > looking for a specific interest we have in common that makes their journal > interesting. I would think, just off the cuff, that replacing "interests" > with tags would work just fine. (But note how little I know about site > architecture and stuff, so it could be a horrible idea.)
Here's a place where replacing "interests" with "tags" wouldn't work: I don't use tags. I don't envision myself using tags in the future. Even if I did, I wouldn't be writing about most of the things in my interests. I have "dragonflies" and "pizza" in my interests (because I like those things) but I don't write about either. I have a bunch of authors in my interests, but if I *were* to write and tag an entry about (say) C.J. Cherryh's newest novel, I'd tag it "books" or "fiction" or maybe "geniuses", none of which are in my interests. With my roleplay journals, I have interests but almost no posts in the journal *itself* (I post to communities with them instead). Since one of the characters I roleplay is represented by an ampersand in the game it's from, I have "ampersands" as one of its interests, even though I never post about typography either in the character's journal *or* in the communities it's part of. It's kind of like the difference between people who use their Bio field to describe themselves, people who use it to describe their journals, and people who use it to collect sparkly banners they've won in web contests, I guess. The "whole point of the field" for me isn't the same as the "whole point of the field" for you. _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
