It's a pain in the butt to tag yourself sometimes. Yeah, jotting down a list of interests takes about 10 seconds, but there is so much more depth to each of our users which we'd like to capture -- for their benefit as well as ours. The more tags/keywords associated to each user's profile, the more interesting and deep the connections we create between our users, and the more each user is "found" when relevant to other users' browsing experience.
Well, in the last week, we took our first steps to helping users tags themselves further, while not requiring any incremental effort (on their part). We're now automagically scanning each of our user's blogs each day and tagging them based on what they write about. Currently, if you associate the tags "fly fishing, Seattle" to your profile, your profile will be displayed to others who show a related interest. Now, if you also blog about fly fishing Seattle, then your rank in our system will increase. Even if you didn't explicitly associate yourself to those tags within your profile, but still write about fly fishing Seattle, we'll pick up on that and show you to others (whereas before we wouldn't have).
The algorithms we're using are new and will certainly be tuned over time, but hey --- it's a start. The next step is to also use browsing behavior, so that repeatedly browsing content (related to fly fishing Seattle, for instance) further increases a user's rank/association to those keywords. That latter one we'll have to be careful with though, making damn sure we don't violate user trust!
I should also note that we very tightly govern the keywords and phrases around which users can connect in the first place. As we carefully expand that list of "connection keywords", we'll naturally do a better job at associating users to their content.
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