dw_suggestions | Add interest keywords to feed accounts

Entry tags:

Add interest keywords to feed accounts

Title:
Add interest keywords to feed accounts

Area:
feeds

Summary:
It's been suggested to make feeds searchable, which is a very good idea. However, I'd also like to be able to use interests to search for them because I think it would be more helpful when you want to find feeds pertaining to a certain topic.

Edit: see this comment for an alternative suggestion which doesn't use interest keywords.

Description:
I have no idea how many feed accounts they are on the site or how many are created per day so, to be honest, I don't know if this is a nice idea or a crazy one and how to implement it. Ideas and discussions are really welcome.

First, who would be able to add interests? Any user? A dedicated team of volunteers? Should users only be able to add interests from a pre-approved list? Could new ones be suggested? How?

Should the interests remain general (e.g. news, comics, music, science, technology, food,...) to be more manageable or would that would make the feature less useful/too restrictive?

What about personal blogs? I can see the potential for drama there. OTOH, it'd be like letting people assign interests to one's profile. OTOH, Neil Gaiman's blog is the feed with the greatest number of subscribers on DW so if we leave these out how useful is the feature?

Anything else?

Poll #6451 Add interest keywords to feed accounts

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 41

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
9 (22.0%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
5 (12.2%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
3 (7.3%)

(I have no opinion)
21 (51.2%)

(Other: please comment)
3 (7.3%)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I don't think this is workable, for two main reasons:

1. There are a lot of feed accounts. There's a list of the top 1000 which isn't exhaustive. Adding interests to them all would be an enormous task.

2. If we start modifying or adding to the content that we syndicate, then more feed owners are likely to want to start blocking us. There's a big difference between syndicating content that has been provided for that purpose (ie, any RSS or atom feed) and then adding to that content and potentially implying that the interests were provided by the initial author or authors.

1. I think categorizing most of this list would be a huge step considering the last one only has two readers. That doesn't seem to me like such an impossible task if it's limited to a short list of categories.

2. Cesy raised the same concern, I believe. I suggested something in reply and would appreciate your input.

If it were abundantly clear that the keywords were user-upplied: like: Dreamwidth users have described this as: funny (100+), geeky (58), interesting (90), problematic (8)... Creators may still have problems with *that*, but different problems, and the same sorts of problems that already exist elsewhere & here & on Amazon. (In my head this is very reminiscent of Amazon book tagging.)

And then one should be able to break it down by many combinations of: all users, all subscribed, nonsubscribers, (past subscribers/people who have never subscribed?), circle members, network members, rlist/access.

The wisdom of the crowd can be excellent sometimes, but DW's strength is social & it makes sense to be able to filter with that. Maybe there could even be anonymous/identity concealed except to access-granted tagging.

I saw LJ had recently done a category type thing for feeds, maybe something similar to that could be done here and then expanded further if need be?

Do you have a link to that please? I don't follow news on LJ and I saw someone mentioned something on my flist but I think it was for communities.

I'd love to have cats, no matter how it's done. That's really the point of this suggestion.

http://news.livejournal.com/136664.html

You're right, it is for communities! But similar concept I think.

Thanks a lot for the link. There's a big difference as maintainers can opt out of this and/or edit their interests. Feed owners wouldn't be able to do that.

It would need to wait for a way to confirm who is the author of the original feed source, I think - letting other people label your content is a recipe for drama.

Some blogs have a line which describes their content; it's in the bio section of the profile page. What would you think if we used keywords from these to build general categories?

Edited 2011-03-31 18:26 (UTC)

Getting closer, but I still think it's too risky - which keywords you use from the bio is controversial, and many sites have more than one area that could be described as "bio". The more automated it can be, the better - anything that requires editorial input from someone not the content owner is ripe for drama.

See above comments - I like the idea, but I'm not sure how it could be implemented fairly; although I do think that some sort of cloud-tagging system would probably be ethically okay, it might be over-difficult to implement & police.

If we ever get the ability to have people "own" feeds, this should definitely be part of that.

I feel like categories would be simpler and more usable, but also a lot of personal blogs would be hard to find because they'd be "Personal" or "General" instead of "cats, crafts, cooking" or whatever. But I do feel there needs to be a good way to navigate feeds.

I'd be very happy to see this done with some sort of categorisation system, not sure it sould work as well for interests but could be done.

FWIW, I use a couple other sites that let me add feeds and suggest categories for them, Wikio is one.

As long as a feed profile page had a clear link and info to, say, support, who could fix them, I think it'd be workable.

I believe there's an extant bug to allow feed entries to link to the original entry and not the DW copy if the feed is configured that way (ie the feed owner sets their feed up), and I also recall some other plans to improve feeds and ownership claiming.

Some feed owners get very very upset about feed "abuse" when a site is merely using the feed for what feeds are designed to do--this would let people find feeds of interest to them in a more easy way, I rarely if ever look at the "top feeds" page, far too many things I have no interest in whatsoever. Sub categories on there, and/or feeds showing up on interest searches, would be very useful to me.

People make interpretations all the time, I do not trust people to place their feeds into the "correct" categories or to tag them in a way that would make sense to me.

I'd be very happy to see this done with some sort of categorisation system ... I use a couple other sites that let me add feeds and suggest categories for them, Wikio is one.

I rather agree, and don't think it's necessary to reinvent the wheel. Others will know what are the norms elsewhere, and Dreamwidth could cherry-pick the best practices for their taxonomy. Unless an agreed taxonomy exists elsewhere, sort of a Dewey Decimal System for the interwebs.

And now, a derail.

Some feed owners get very very upset about feed "abuse" when a site is merely using the feed for what feeds are designed to do

Licensing, and the way Dreamwidth (and other sites running similar code) are prepared to completely ignore it. There seems to be a blatant contradiction between the BBC's terms and conditions - particularly clause 6.4 - and the current practice on another site, displaying advertiser's announcements on a page full of BBC content.

The point for Dreamwidth is that its code doesn't consider licensing terms at all - it assumes that it has carte blanche to reproduce the content, run its own comments facility, and generally treat third-party work as a submission to Dreamwidth. Nor does Dreamwidth appear to respect time-to-live settings, so it polls more often than it's told, wasting bandwidth.

All of that may be standard procedure, but it's highly impolite and uncivil. If Dreamwidth gets a reputation for disrespecting license terms, as another site has done, then content creators will quite reasonably get upset and become more likely to reduce or refuse it service.

I also recall some other plans to improve feeds and ownership claiming.

This has been "coming soon" for so long that I assume it to be vapourware unless demonstrated otherwise.

In summary. The original proposal I can bear. Dreamwidth needs to improve its RSS etiquette.

There are some bugs filed to fix the way feeds work, one specifically would pretty much remove the comments on this site aspect based on a setting within the feed. But coding it is completely beyond me, and I don't think it's claimed, it'd be a low priority for most devs currently as there's so much user facing stuff to fix.

It is something many would like to see done though. But it's nowhere near the top of even my wishlist, and I'm more keen on it than many (plus, you know, not a coder).

This has been "coming soon" for so long that I assume it to be vapourware unless demonstrated otherwise.

You assume incorrectly! Everything open in Bugzilla will be added eventually, when someone finds it compelling enough to spend their time working on it. Bugs are not closed until and unless they are finished or they become technically impossible.

Also, I'm not sure what you mean about point 6.4 of the BBC's T&C. We don't display advertising.

not sure what you mean about point 6.4 of the BBC's T&C. We don't display advertising

Which is the only reason he has an account here, he's talking about The Other Site there, and he's right to say they've been in breach of BBC T&Cs for years as a result of the adverts.

That your opinion on ads on a site like this is very close to mine is a significant draw to some people ;-)

I would like to be able to display all the feeds on one page. That way I could use the 'find (string) in text' function in my browser to locate the feeds I'm interested in. Usually I have a feed in mind... take for example something that is probably not in the feeds: Equestria Daily. To find the Equestria Daily feed, if it existed, I would not rely on tags or descriptions. I would search for strings such as "eques", "daily", "mlp" and "magic". I do the same exercise on the latest.bml page. As it stands, I have to repeat my search on all 10 pages of the 1000 top feeds/list, and the list does not extend past the top 1000. Perhaps displaying all the feeds on one page is excessive, especially if there are, say, 5000. In that case, 1000 feeds per page? Would that be a load problem?

If you want to find the feed for a specific site, put the url for the feed into the searchbox and it'll either show you what the feed is or ask you to create one (which anyone can do on DW, it's not a paid feature).

As it happens, one doesn't exist, but you can add one by clicking here and naming it ;-)

It is fair to say that the interface to allow searching for specific sites could be more userfriendly--I never use it as i've hacked my browser to do it automatically, but i think the feed search solves your problem?

I'm afraid I have not succeeded in reproducing your methodology. I know there is at least one (more if they still haven't been merged) feeds for the Girl Genius comic. I placed the following url: http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php into the search field at the top of this page and selected "Site and Account". Then I tried "Interest". I also shortened the url to http://www.girlgeniusonline.com and tried again. Same result. I tried the Content Search function in the side bar of my pages (the pages in my style, the ones I see when I read my own blog). That only gave me blog posts, not feeds.

I would like to be able to reproduce your results. 8^)

Meanwhile, thank you for the link. I won't be creating that feed quite yet as Equestria Daily is on fire. With so many new posts each day I prefer to go directly there to catch up rather than have it bury the rest of my reading material. It's also fun to watch the hit meter climb while I'm there.

You don't want the web address, you want the feed address. look for the feed icon in your browser taskbar on the site (not knowing what version of which browser I can't be more specific, on firefox 3.6 it's on the top right of the address).

That gives the feed address of http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/ggmain.rss

Try that ;-)

I'm using Firefox 3.5.5. I do have a feed icon in the location bar when I go to http://www.girlgeniusonline.com and when I click on it, it opens up a page with the feed address you cited. Something similar happens on Equestria Daily. I'm learning.

And yet, searching DW for http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/ggmain.rss is giving a null result. Not even blogs this time. I must be using the wrong search fields. The site map appears to only have the search fields I've already tried. The Feed Accounts page does not seem to include a dedicated search feature. Google only gives me 2 results for the url +dreamwidth: one Livejournal result and one Insanejournal result.

http://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/

Add feed by URL.

If you're willing to play around with about:config in firefox you can automate it, there was a howto posted in, IIRC,

dw_nifty but it wasn't one of mine.

Aha! Thanks! See my reply to

azurelunatic below. Next time I come across a post stating 'I can't find feed X' I'll try that as well. 8^)

The interface where one adds feeds doubles as a search, for the exact feed and not a variant. It's poorly documented, and also inherited behavior.

Ah, that makes sense as a means to reduce duplication of feeds. 8^) As I didn't want to create a new feed I didn't try that, just in case I wouldn't be able to cancel in mid process. As you say, that only works for exact matches, not variants. Thus it can be useful in finding feeds poorly named by the original subscriber, but being able to list all the feeds in 1000 item batches would be very useful in finding all the variants of a feed in most cases.

I wouldn't worry about that though (it might be good to sort feeds by source urL though, hmmm). if duplicate feeds are created (is someone uses the RSS, someone else uses the ATOM), then Support usually merge them together. You don't lose much from having dupe feeds given the vast number of feeds the system is set up to handle.

There are pros and cons, and neutral, for duplicate feeds.

Pro: some feeds may include the content of the feed, while others merely link to the source. With Girl Genius I prefer the latter. It reminds me to go read the comic once a month. If there was only one feed and it posted the latest page three times a week, I would be dissatisfied.

Con: having all subscribers on the same feed help grade the popularity of the source. It also facilitates discussion in the feed comments, albeit temporary. It could serve as another avenue for networking reading lists via common tastes.

Neutral: the system can handle a vast number of feeds (your statement), no harm, no foul.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Add interest keywords to feed accounts

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject