JAWW (beta)
The ward is a factory for the Combine
“mob folksonomy” isn’t going anywhere new as well
yes, by this post I am still continuing my pet peeved Anti-Global Tags campaign as there are new details have been revealed recently after Automattic about-turned .com “Hot Posts” front-page to preconceived by the staff set of Categories (“News Departments”).
in contrary to the popular belief that Category links in the .com post-meta section lead unaware visitor out of your blog just to drive traffic to ad-laden tag pages, it appeared that they are not actually having ads at all.
admittedly, I was just about to blog about this before, cause I never saw any ads on Tag pages, and, finally, an official source (Andy, one of .com developers) just has confirmed that.
To dispel your theory about the “cookie-free masses” being funneled into high-paying ad zones, I ask you to test it yourself. Disable cookies and click from the front page to any blog. You won’t see ads that way.
ok, so if “You won’t see ads that way” then WHISKEY-TANGO-FOXTROT (3 times) are you sending people off there from a user’s post for?
now I have to reiterate my question again since it still remains being a valid one: where is at least a COMMON SENSE, guys?
not that it has a great importance to me — I just don’t get it by no means.
another funny discovering: there’s a little known profile page on .com at http://wordpress.com/profile (mine is at http://wordpress.com/profile/options), it contains a nice tags heat-map cloud. so, what do you think, all my tags listed out there go out to the… yes, of course, to the Global Tags system.
hello, my tags on my profile are supposed to be linking to my blog, aren’t they? otherwise, WTF this profile is for?
now a little about this post title: I don’t care if .com’s front-page will have a section heading “Right Now in Mob Folksonomy“, either I don’t mind if that mob folksonomy pages would have ads.
actually, instead of fugly plastering them on user blogs, GT is the very proper location where they actually should go (in place of links to competing with .com GT system third-party tag aggregating services).
Hopefully we will open up the system for user-generated queries so you could rank all recent public posts tagged “wank” or whatever. Those queries are currently very expensive but it’s something I want to do.
of course, there’s a little we can expect from such a toy DBMS as MySQL, but in fact, many users will be already happy by just having a form to perform a far more simple queries like combined tag search on the whole .com site, just look into forums — this request comes quite often.
also, result pages of that search queries is the most perfect and natural place for an advertisement. moreover, based on searched Tag keywords, it will allow to place more precisely targeted ads, than those which irritate confused .com bloggers, but that’s by the way.
i’m not sure about the profile pages. for one, they’ve been hanging around unused and unlinked for forever. i only saw them because some automattic staff member was testing on mine. (the referral showed up in my stats).
as with most SNSes, the “interest” links on a profile always link to other users with the same interest.
uhm, I just considered the profile page as a handy dynamic site-map page, which .com is desperately lacking of.
actually, I don’t mind having links to other users with the same interests in my profile — I just want this page link to my own posts in the first place.
it could be implemented just the same way you have already saw (and liked ;-).
moreover, the only reason the profile page is linking to GT is the same filters applied to the
get_the_category()as in post-meta.1. We’re pretty happy with our toy DBMS MySQL. It serves many thousands of queries per second on relatively cheap hardware.
2. We’re constantly doing things to try to drive more visitors and comments to our blogs, because that’s what our primary customer (bloggers) has told us that they love.
We don’t show ads on that traffic, and our business is such we don’t need to. The purpose is to make bloggers happier and get them more distribution.
hello Matt,
thanks for stopping by and taking your time to comment it — I really appreciate it. so far, it seems like you are the top commenter on this blog.
my question was about why are you so against having a compromise solution proposed from the very beginning?
hasn’t that said above a primary customer of yours also told you they detest this misleading feature which is fooling their visitors and breaking their blogs navigation at the same time? didn’t they also tell you they’d like to opt out it, did they?
here are some comments copied from your own .com news blog for your convenience left by .com bloggers, do you ever read them or such comments don’t count as not being a fan-boyish enough ones?
you may also find a fair number of amused/annoyed by GT users in the forums.
.
#re: “We’re pretty happy with our toy DBMS MySQL”
I knew that ‘toy’ and ‘MySQL’ (
RDBMS) would be a trigger keyword combination ;-)I have no doubts that you, being an expert, can fine tune MySQL up to its optimum to get a maximal performance boost from it. still it would be great if you’d share how exactly many thousands of queries per second (concurrence?) serves a single instance; and how it degrades after reaching the maximum concurrence level?
it would be very interesting get some facts about MySQL performance under heavy workload in the real-world environment such as wordpress.com is.
also, there’s no doubts that MySQL ideally suits WP.com application model i.e. bunch of straightforward queries via simple SELECTS w/o sub-queries: get data In as much and fast as possible (who cares about injection vulnerabilities, data corruption, a couple or another hundred of lost posts etc etc).
anyway, “It’s just blog software, we don’t really need anything that fancy”, do we?
and, btw, are you on MySQL AB Enterprise Server?
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There was some confusion when we first introduced the feature but once people started seeing how tags could drive additional traffic to their pages they changed their mind.
However even for something that 99% of people love and 1% hate because of the size of WordPress.com you’ll find a few thousand people who hate anything we do or change. Our job is filtering that feedback for good ideas and deciding what’s best for the majority of our users.
oh, come on Matt, what/who all that sham about “majority of our users, primary customer” and such is for?
for the N+1 time — it’s not about million of clueless lemmings who are happy to receive some random clicks from links located on the Global Tags pages, it’s about those who are still confused by misleading links to GT page you placed on the blogs of their own by the autocratic way.
naturally, many of cited in my previous comment bloggers already left .com for good (along with their content), being fed up with a disrupted navigation on their blogs without any option to opt out, or merely having some sort of compromise solution they had proposed to you in vain. but there are new users coming to .com who are equally confused and annoyed. and please notice this latter one is a very intelligent community member and not just a regular hit-whore (which probably more accords with the .com target audience though, regarding where it seems to be geared into).
could you please be open and just one time answer honestly to my simple questions you were asked more than once:
* what’s wrong with an idea to have BOTH kind of links in the post-meta: to the Global Tag page AND to the Local Category/Tag archives as well?
e.g.:
— etc; there is also a detailed picture in the ancient blog post.
* why do you believe it isn’t good enough “for the majority of our users”?
despite it had been proposed to you by the community members a number of times (please see their comments above).
* why Mature blogs category links in the post-meta mislead to an absolutely EMPTY GT page, thus completely confusing visitors and making it totally impossible for such blogs to opt it out at the same time?
however, I perfectly realize, of course, that .com is your host/business and you can do whatever you want or need to, but still can’t understand why do you need to talk through my hat, making it as though you don’t get what I’m trying to talk with you about?
everyone is OK with having GT links in their post-meta section, but the lack of links to Local Tag and/or inability to opt out is a PURE EVIL which you do. and you know it, but why?
is it possible that girl again is right on money
simply can’t believe it…
I really like these very tech savvy analyses of WP com and all Matt’s machinations. This post is a great read. The whole tag thing is going to be fertile territory for wank for a long time I think.
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