I thought I would add another data point and say that I don't have any interests entered at all, because I found them a not-very-useful way to search for journals I might be interested in, and so er, lost interest in using them myself. Because as previously mentioned, a lot of people use it to describe themselves, social networking style, rather than to describe their journal. I think that usage should be respected, so I agree that the interests system shouldn't be merged with tags, if it is to be altered at all.
Rather than altering the interests system, how about just expanding the functions of the tag system? What if the tag cloud, or "top 30 tags," for people who don't like clouds, was part of the profile? Having a tag cloud/top tags list as part of the profile (separate from the interests field) would be an organic way of reflecting the journal's content, and would change as the journal changed. How about also searching journals by not only interests, but frequently used tags? In other words, not a search for all posts containing this tag, but for users who frequently use this tag. For example, searching for the tag "travel books" would give you a list of users for which "travel books" was a frequently used tag, similar to the current interest search. These would be public tags and reflect usage on public posts, of course. Charmian _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
