>> 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.
You make some excellent points, thank you for correcting me. I guess what I was thinking of when I talked about the "point" of interests is the way the LJ site architecture encourages them to be used--as a way (and pretty much the only way besides getting recs from people) of finding people whose journals interest you and are writing about things you want to read. Because, of course, we *all* know that people only use features the way the designers intended them to be used, right? ;) Beatrice Otter _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
