Livejournal interests suggestion meme!

[ixwin]

Based on the lj interests lists of those who share my more unusual interests, the interests suggestion meme thinks I might be interested in
1. writing score: 36
2. books score: 31
3. music score: 27
4. harry potter score: 24
5. anime score: 20
6. poetry score: 20
7. cats score: 19
8. monty python score: 18
9. movies score: 17
10. chocolate score: 17
11. terry

Comments

[calieber]

Of course, I'm interested in things I don't list (mostly bands that are going to be common). It just occurred to me that this throws off the results in two ways: not only is, say, celibacy (which fascinates me intellectually but isn't something I'd likely want to do on purpose) eligible to be listed in the results, but if it were rare, people who list it would contribute to interests' scores less than they otherwise would -- possibly even to the extent of altering the composition of the top 20.

Also, some of the things I list are shorthand for "being the kind of person who would list X." I think "competititve sausage racing" falls in that category.

Hm. I may have to join blog_sociology just to promote and discuss this (with your permission, of course).

If I might offer some constructive criticism: It might be more meaningful -- not that it isn't meaningful now -- if more weight were given to number of common interests. Intuitively, I'm more likely to share an interest with someone whom I already share three interests with than with three people I only share one interest with each (although if it's the same interest ... we have too many things for me to keep track of). As it is now, an interest shared by one person who lists "ethical culture" and one person who lists "jewish geography" and one person who lists "stand-up philosophy" (to take three of my less common interests) gets the same three points as one listed by one person who lists all three, and I think I have more of an affinity with that one person than with the first three combined.

[livredor]

Ooh, Jewish geography! Good thought, I'm definitely interested in that, I can't think why I never listed it before!

[ixwin]

Feel free to promote/discuss this wherever you like. For me half (actually probably more like 90%) of the fun of doing something like this is seeing it spread and watching people's reactions and responses. It's only sitting on a small server in a friend's garage, though, so I hope people will be forgiving if it's not superfast or always up.

As to the weighting, you're probably right. I just went for the simplest option, and as it seemed to give sufficiently varied and interesting answers, left it at that. If there's sufficient interest, I suppose I could produce an "experimenter's version" which allowed the user to enter a weighting factor as you describe, and also to specify the number of users who could list an interest before it stopped counting as 'unusual' and then they could investigate what impact those things had on the results.

[bridgetester]

Hmmm... I definitely second the weighting for users that have common interests, as some of those things are only moderately interesting.

cooking, writing, camping, harry potter, photography, friends, coffee, sewing, radiohead, travel, rain, sushi, swimming, jazz, theatre, dreams, monty python, hiking, dancing, french

What about a script that goes through and pulls out the interests that only one (or a few) person lists, or the interests that the most people list? *curious*

[ixwin]

Well, the overall most popular interests are listed at
http://www.livejournal.com/interests.bml?view=popular

(I thought of using this as a filter on my results, but again decided it was better to keep things simple)

[bridgetester]

Granted. Twould be interesting if your script looked at the 20 interests and marked the ones that were popular, but that's yet more processing time.

[bridgetester]

Looking through the suggested interests, I'd definitely prefer the option for a popularity filter. All of them are on the "highly popular" list. :)