Blockquoth
sleeping wolf:
What was the purpose of the foo everythingians nodes, as sleeping wolf perceives it?
To provide an index for users based on qualities they had, and to allow looking for commonalities.
Now you'll have to forgive me for joinging into this by
tacking on a writeup. E2 is a big place, and will only get bigger. As it takes
new and interesting curves, is a system like this going to be able to adapt? For example,
sleeping wolf mentions the idea of who would come up with the categories. While it is easy to define some of the categories now, as this grows it may not be so easy.
But, I am all for making it easier to communicate with groups. For example, living in
Tampa, I would love to be able to easily find everyone in
Florida when I want to have a meet. When I first started, going to the
user registry for Florida was interesting. There were all types of entries in all manner of forms. However, because we are evolutionary, someone went in and cleaned it up and standardized the way of its formatting.
I realize that having someone oversee the groups is labor-intensive, and sucks if that person goes away. But those issues will work out in time, without us having to code anything at all.
But say I wanted to find all of the musicians in the
southeast. Much more challenging task. I first have to gather up every name from the UR, then go through each of the names and figure out if they might be a
musician, then /msg them individually.
So here is my proposal. Perhaps it can coexist peacefully with the other ideas above, but here goes. Allow easier creation of groups, ala
Yahoo groups (to a degree) for /msgs only. This way we can all be individuals, while making it easier to find those with common interests. As a second point, it allows for evolutionary expansion of the concept without user interaction (i.e. someone deciding the categories). I would love to be able to /msg
Florida_Musicians.
But the biggest point for me is it does not get me to try to conform to any one category. I already get
spam from someone who has lifted my email address on e2 (e2 at cornetdesign.com). Setting up categories would mean that people could send
targeted advertisements and the such.
Finally, have nodes where the users of a group are shown. But also allow a user to
opt-out from being shown in that node when they enter the group.
Anyway, that's my two cents, and no matter which direction we move in, if I can offer any help please let me know.