Very cool, if true

there are more things broken than just lack of filtering.

livejournal confuses access lists with subscription lists. you friend someone, you read them. you want someone to be able to read your posts, you friend them.

dreamwidth attempts to split this in too, but there is another problem.

One person is essentially one rss feed to livejournal - one account, one blog. Most people here have multiple accounts on different sites, all with different feeds.

I should be able to indicate to livejournal that I have other blogs, and it should include them.

The problem I mentioned is one of syndication, not one of filtering.

For example if you wish to cross post dw content to lj you could add an rss feed, or use something to post over on lj for you.

But if you wanted to do the opposite too, post all lj content on dw - you need extra crap to avoid repeatedly cross posting things.

Filtering by tags to achive optional subscriptions is only one way to solve this, but I don't think it alone helps much.

On the other hand, right now you can just create a community which you only have access to, and syndicate content there.

I for instance try to keep all my tech stuff in a seperate community, and personal stuff in my own livejournal. It isn't much effort.

My point is that you can *right now* allow people to opt into syndicated content by using a community for it, rather than merging it into your blog.

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Also if you create a seperate outright account, you don't have to share your username and password with the sites :)

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I should be able to indicate to livejournal that I have other blogs, and it should include them.

I have no idea what you mean by this. Include them where? As what?

Filtering by tags to achive optional subscriptions is only one way to solve this, but I don't think it alone helps much.
I could use it to filter out everything marked "links", for instance. Or "WH40k"

I don't want to have to friend fifteen different communities and RSS feeds to get everything a person is producing. If you want to post in lots of places that's fine, but my LJ is for me to post anything I feel like, in any format I like. If you don't want that, that's fine for you, but it's very much how I feel about my personal space. Placing filtering technology in your hands seems to be the only reasonable method of mitigating the effect on you.

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If people don't want to seperate their posts, then I don't feel the need to read them :)

Livejournals existing filtering method works quite well

(and the effort of adding one or two communities to your friends list for the small minority who syndicate at the moment is a minimal one-off effort)

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matgb

Problem. You set up a filter to exclude say, my posts, that are tagged as something you want to avoid.

Except a lot of my posts are linkspams. And I tend to go back and retag all my linkspams with anything relevent.

So it may have a huge amount of stuff you like, but one link that doesn't interest you. But I want that link findable from my tagcloud, as that's what the cloud is for.

It is, BTW, possible, to get a feed of someone's specific tags, but you can't do it on LJ directly—you'd need to mash that feed through something like Feedburner or Pipes.

Or you could just take the feed and put it on DW. But mashing it first gives you more control I think.

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Oh, and you may find this useful:

http://matgb.livejournal.com/354073.html?format=light

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matgb

Heh, that post has more incoming links than anything I've posted for ages. Virtually all approving of the ability to remove it.

One line of (basic) CSS. One line.

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Filtering by tag seems kinda pointless unless everyone's using a consistent set of tags. For example, if I wanted to get all the knitting posts on my friends page (not the most likely search I know, but it's as good an example as any) then I have to use "knit geek" for one, "yarn" for another, etc. A fair chunk of tags would only return me results for one person anyway, no different to just clicking on their tags.

Without a fixed set I can't see it working. Even for common things like "work" that would return multiple journals, I still wouldn't know if I was seeing all "work" posts or if someone had tagged a post "day-to-day" or "the grindstone" and I'd missed it.

As for Dreamwidth, having had a quick skim of their FAQ, they seem to be just reinventing the wheel and then painting it pretty colours. As far as I can tell, all it will do is mean I'll lose half my friends off LJ when some of you migrate or I'll have to faff around with two sites to comment on cross-posted entries.

Maybe I'm missing something and you can sell it to me, Mr D, but it just looks like it'll be a pain in the arse for those happy with LJ at the moment. And even if I move, I'll still need to keep an LJ for those who don't migrate. More hassle than it's worth all round it seems.

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You can set up an account on dw using your livejournal openid.

You can be added to other peoples access lists and read and comment on all your friends posts.

Not much faff, but still some faff.

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If there was the ability to filter things out by tag then I can see social pressure pushing people to use common tags to make their friends lives easier.

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Those with a well-established set of tags aren't going to want to re-tag everything (or even change the tags they've got for future stuff). They'll just want everyone else to change for their benefit. Even if they did, you'd never end up with one common set unless it was imposed on them and that would piss so many people off.

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You wouldn't impose it on them. And having to ban "Knit", "Knitting" and "Teh Knitness" wouldn't be _that_ big an overhead on my life...

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That's fine for filtering out, but it wouldn't work anywhere near as well if you were trying to filter in as you'd never know if your results had none, some or all of your friends posts on a topic.

Filter out "knit" and "knitting" and you know anything tagged with those is off the list.

Filter in "knit" and "knitting" and you've got no indication that you missed "teh knitness".

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Oh God - I wouldn't use it for filtering in. That would be awful.

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You may not, but if you're going to have tag-filtering then others will want it to filter in.

TBH, I'd say the whole idea was unworkable.

Say you want to skip knitting posts but in the same post someone includes gig details that you would have wanted to go to? It's tagged with "knit" and "gigs". Without a filter in for "gigs" you're never going to see that post. Which wins? The filter in or filter out?

You're never going to get poeple to be limited to just one tag (or post about one thing at a time). It's a complete non-starter in my eyes.

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People may want to use it for a variety of things, and I think you'd have problems with it any way round - if people want to filter stuff then they'll have to live with unwanted side-effects, this is common with all filtering systems.

I can't see people saying "I only want to read things people have tagged X" - because most people don't tag things at all - doing a site-wide check for posts tagged with something strikes me as more useful - like the Twitter HashTag effect:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23amazonfail

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the-magician.livejournal.com

"I only want to read things people have tagged #eastercon" ... oh wait, that *is* the Twitter HashTag ... but you said "I can't see people saying I only want to read things people have tagged X" and then it appears you contradict yourself ... I'm confused ...

... after a convention, I'd love to be able to see all the con reports, photos etc. that people have posted about that subject ... I might want to see all the RaceFail posts (or I might want to filter out all the RaceFail and re-twittered posts but leave in discussion of Twitter ...

... my biggest problem with Twitter is that the standard webpage doesn't seem to support "groups" so I can't divide my quick scan of recent tweets into "real friends", "celebs I always want to read", "celebs I occasionally want to read" and "other stuff that I have on there and will read if I have time, like @MayorOfLondon" ... and I'd love either the poster or social moderation to prioritise Tweets so that "I went to the toilet" posts are modded down and I can set a sliding filter to hide those, and "There are free ice creams tomorrow at Ben & Jerry's shops in the UK and US" gets modded up
(oh, by the way, apparently there *are* free ice-creams tomorrow at Ben & Jerry's shops in the UK and USA, really)

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I can't see people wanting to read their friends list with positive filters. At least not very often. Unless you had a lot of friends you wouldn't tend to get much out of it. Although occasional stuff like eastercon might make it worthwhile. Site-wide filters would be more useful though.

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atreic.livejournal.com

I think a tag for 'this is an invite to something I actually want you at' would be a very useful way of filtering a friends page.

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the-magician.livejournal.com

I have a lot of friends.

I want to be able to filter for "party", for "filkcon", for "eastercon", for "contact", for "help", for that thing that someone mentioned last week and now it's too far back on the scroll but I want to find it again to add to memories or point out to someone else. ... for that thing that someone mentioned as a comment to someone else's post (I may or may not be able to remember who made the comment, I probably don't remember the head posting or who made the head posting ... e.g. someone is talking about being late for work ... down the comments someone posts a link to a new flying car ... a week later I want to find that flying car link again ... positive filtering for the win!)

I reckon I'd use a positive filter pretty much every day.

Just because you don't want it, doesn't mean others don't. Or that having it available wouldn't then reveal it to be more useful ...

I certainly don't want to filter every posting on the site for a lot of this stuff, particularly "that thing that someone mentioned last week" ... which often involves scrolling back hundreds or thousands of entries ...

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It was more that I saw this is as two quite different use cases - people seem to frequently say "I want to read my friends page without X on it" - i.e. filtering. They very rarely say "I want to see just X on my friends page" - but they do say "I wish I could search better".

So I'd see filtering _in_ as part of search, and filtering _out_ as part of the day-to-day usage of your friends page.

But the street finds it's own uses for things.

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the-magician.livejournal.com

Ok, I'll accept that.

Filtering is producing a *saved* view on your friends list (like groups) that you can use for reading ... so instead of creating an "Eastercon committee" group which would include all the postings from your Eastercon committee friends, whether it was about Eastercon or not ... you'd apply a filter that just showed entries tagged "eastercon".

Searching is finding a message or subset of messages based on a tag/contents, and is ephemeral.

Based on that, I've come around to your view on filtering and searching :-)

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Whereas I'm now convinced that there are many more options (and potential problems) than I thought of when I started.

A Win/Win situation!

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nmg.livejournal.com

Filtering by tag seems kinda pointless unless everyone's using a consistent set of tags.

Filter by (user, tag) pairs. Problem solved.

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erindubitably.livejournal.com

I dreamt Scout was a tiger last night,
Grown to twenty feet or more.
I admit it gave me quite a fright,
When she danced in jam upon the floor.

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poisonduk.livejournal.com

and the prize for my favourite comment of the day goes to.....

I am so glad I'm working form home today as I laughed incredibly loudly at the thought of Scout dancing in Jam.

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laserboy.livejournal.com

*applause*

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darkoshi

*cheers*

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aliiis.livejournal.com

hehe, I must have been on Facebook too long, I was looking for where to click 'I like this'!

I guess I will just have to post a comment that says 'I like this' then :P

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ninebelow.livejournal.com

It would be nice if tags were global on Livejournal. I don't necessarily want to filter my Flist but I wouldn't mind seeing all posts tagged, say, "books".

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Would be useful - much like the Twitter tagging stuff. Being able to keep track of the zeitgeist would be very handy.

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pickwick.livejournal.com

Ah, now, yes - to have some sort of hashtag equivalent for LJ would be fantastic.

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matgb

or, perchance, 'polls'?

But yeah, I believe that's a mid term aim of Dreamwidth, and it's possible on Vox and Wordpress. I think there's a 3rd party search site that tries to do it as well. That it isn't done here is a sign of how badly coded the tag implementation is (and I'm told "badly coded" is a compliment really to how bad it really is).

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pickwick.livejournal.com

I voted for the "let me see everything" option in 1&3, with the full knowledge that I skim past 80% of twitterposts and varying numbers of normal entries, depending on how much time I have. I prefer to have it all there and ignore the bits I don't want, than try and filter in, and inevitably miss things I would have wanted to see.

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anton-p-nym.livejournal.com

I heartily endorse this product and/or service. My filter system for unwanted Twitter posts and bad cat koans is to skim past them... my Friends filter is basically picking Friends whom I want to read on a regular basis and whom I trust to respect the "Friends lock" on my own posts.

I could see a rationale for separating the "want to read" and "want to be read by" Friends. But not the rest.

-- Steve thinks that a universal tag system sort might be useful if your Friends list uses a similar tag structure. But they don't, necessarily, so such a feature would be of dubious utility.

PS: I'm not even vaguely interested in Dreamwidth. I came to LJ because my friends are on LJ, not because of the architecture.

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Why Twitter x-posts to LJ (or anything else) are a bad idea.

Until Twitter's even vaguely secure, it should be allowed out to play with others :)

Edited Date: 2009-04-20 02:40 pm (UTC)

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Which is pretty funny, but clearly not a serious objection.

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Oops, meant "shouldn't be allowed out"

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matgb

Except that the insecurity was caused by people hacking javascript into profiles and somehow into tweets.

LJ automatically removes all JS from anything you try to post.

LJ makes you secure, even if one of your friends is stupid enough to get infected with that hack (which required user action to allow the infection from what I understand).

Although I have now set my tweet imports to a private filter, I was using them as a substitute for actual content, which is bad.

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I disagree - as long as they're good content I'm fine with them.

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matgb

I'll add you into the filter then ;-)

My problem was that I'd stopped posting actual posts and just wrote quick observations on Twitter.

I'm best when I write about something properly, it makes me think more. But yes, I'm fine with them, but it was something Seth Godin said—if you've nothing much to say, better to say nothing.

I might reconsider if I get back into the habit of posting regularly.

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