I need your thoughts on link grouping

[andrewducker]

I've been thinking about grouping my links. Given a list of ten or more links, my posts start to look pretty intimidating.

The obvious thing to do is to group them by tag. Funny ones in one group, political ones in a different group. People who don't care about Scottish Independence can skip down to Cats.

But I have some questions about how to approach this. And I'm hoping you lot can suggest options. Or tell me when my ideas don't match yours.

Approach:
Links grouped automatically based on the tags used in that individual post.

User can specify what tags to ignore for grouping purposes.

Minimum group sizes: There's no point having a group with a single link in it. I'm thinking three is a good minimum size, but it should probably be user-definable.

Minimize ungrouped links: Whatever grouping method I use should leave the smallest number of links in the "Other" grouping as possible.

Tag group crossover: If I have five links all tagged with both "USA" and "Politics" then the group should presumably be "USA politics".

Partial subgroup crossover: What if there are three "USA politics" links and one "UK politics" links, with a minimum group size of two? Do I have a single "Politics" group with four tags in it? A "Politics" group with a subgroup "USA" and a standalone link in it? Something else?

Partial crossover: What if there are two "funny" links, two "Politics" links, and one "funny politics" link (with a minimum group size of three)? Randomly assign the crossover link to one of the two groups to make it large enough? Assign it to both and have it appear twice? What if one of the two tags was already popular enough to have its own tag? What if both of them are? What if all three of them are?

As you can see, this goes from "things that are trivial" to "I have no idea what to do here". Which is why I haven't done anything with it yet.

Anyone got any suggestions?

Comments

[dalglir]

Erm. I'm not sure it needs it. Links may appear chaotic on some days but that may be part of their appeal. A sorting algorithm may provide you with a warm fuzzy feeling but might also add unnecessary complexity?

To be clear: I'm happy with how the links posts appear today. If anything, I'd be tempted to simplify their presentation by removing the tags entirely(!).

[matgb]

I like the tags, helps find stuff, but I agree I'm never bothered by the length of the list.

[dalglir]

I can certainly live with the tags - they sometimes help to identify what might be behind an undescribed headline. But I tend to just work my way down the list, opening links in new tabs as interest takes me.

[pseudomonas]

So, you need to take all n of your tags and then you can represent each link as a point in n-dimensional space, with coordinates in (0,1) for each dimension. Then you just need to normalise, and it's a simple matter of clustering the points into empirical groups using some self-organizing map algorithm.

Or as the people above said, the current thing is just fine, maybe optimize for screen space by putting the tags in a smaller font or something.

[andrewducker]

The question is _what_ clustering algorithm, and how to cope with crossover (which I thought was the interesting bit).

Although, yes, if most people are happy then I shouldn't change anything.

[pseudomonas]

Thinking about it again, if it were me, I'd probably just say project them into 1 dimension (using something PCA-ish) cos then you get an ordering rather than a grouping.

But I honestly don't think there's a problem with your current system.

[matgb]

maybe optimize for screen space by putting the tags in a smaller font or something.

I'd forgotten that's not automatic, it's in my DW CSS:
.delicious-tags, .link-tags a:link{
text-transform:capitalize ;
color:#9af;
font-size:smaller;
text-align: right;
}

[cmcmck]

I'm another one happy enough to explore without tags- you often get me reading stuff I wouldn't otherwise read.

[franklanguage]

Agreed. Completely.

[cheekbones3]

I'm happy as it is, no matter what the size of the list.

[cheekbones3]

Also, I think I've used the tags maybe once or twice ever.

[cahwyguy]

Themed news chum. It's what's for breakfast :-).

For me, part of the fun is trying to come up with a theme to connect my items. Sometimes it is subject. Sometimes it is a chain. Sometimes it is number. And sometime I can't do it. But I always insist on at least 3 things in a themed chum post.

[andrewducker]

I'm not sure how I'd manage that in an automated manner. And going manual at this point would be a huge amount of extra work.

[cahwyguy]

What you might do is create "theme tags" that you can assign to posts. When there are more than three articles in a theme tag group your tool can notify you. You can then have the ability to release theme tag groups for posting, or the ability to do an "other" post for things that don't tag. You could even have your tool prompt you for a clever subject or introductory text for a post.

[andrewducker]

Oooh. I like that.

Not for this week, but I can definitely think about it for the future.

[birguslatro]

I'm with the leave them as they are crowd.

And those who're intimidated by links shouldn't really be on the internet, right?

Your links are a great source of random news.