Some of you may have noticed a change to the "Expert Tag" fields on the profile. Specifically, "Expert Tags" have become just "Tags," and the instructions say to use this field for Areas of Expertise, Interests, and Groups.
Let me give you some background on what happened.
First, StarkTruth wrote me and suggested that "Areas of Expertise" was too limiting - that "Areas of Interest" might be more useful. This made a lot of sense to me, as the whole point of this feature will be to help folks find other folks who share interests, and not just to find an expert.
Then, designer extraordinaire Wurkit made a supa fly comment about how he was going to "abuse" the expert tag feature to stay abreast of what his friends from RefreshPhoenix were reviewing.
I found this brilliant. I've often wondered about an easy way to filter reviews by various sub groups on. The Trusted Network functionality is cool, but it's one size fits all. Maybe I trust someone for one thing like music, but not so much for politics.
For example, I have a number of mini social networks that I keep in touch with. There's my friends from high school, my friends from college, the folks from my Web2.0 stuff, the guys from my hoops team, the various sides of my family, folks from other forums, etcetera.
Many of these folks get on RIA at one point or another. What this tagging feature is going to do is to allow me to filter reviews by one group or another, by just clicking a link.
For example, some of my tags include:
haas (my wife's school friends)
wmw (an online forum that i particpate in)
web2.0
All I have to do is to circulate these tags among my groups, and presto, I'll have an instant filter to find out what each particular subgroup is talking about.
An obvious example would be a TrinityOfEvil tag for Numbah, BlueOrchid, and Madhatter. By tagging themselves by this group, the trinity of evil can stay easily abreast of all of the evil things spewing from their compadres.
This will all make more sense once we launch the output part of this feature.... hopefully this will be later this week.
So this tagging feature can now be helpful for 1) finding people who share interests; 2) finding an expert in something specific; 3) and staying on top of what our particular subgroups are talking about.
Is this as cool as I think it is, or am I just being a geek?
4/26/06
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Ok, the tagging roll out isn't quite working yet, but we're close. We should have the errors on the output page sorted out today... in the meantime, tag your ares of expertise, coordinate with your buddies common tags, and let's figure out other ways to use this feature.
ReplyDeleteFor example, I think i'm going to tag myself with "tall" - just to keep tabs on what all the tall people on the site are saying. Cause that's important :)