Thursday, September 21, 2006

Blogger profiles, the undiscovered feature

One of my students mentioned in class today that he wished more people had filled out their blogger profiles for an assignment I gave them. This isn't something I've particularly paid attention to (profiles, not my students), as it asks you seemingly unimportant questions - what books do you like, what movies do you like, etc. - it all seemed like a waste of time.

Well, today I finally poked around some people's profiles, and it turns out they are way more clever than I thought. The items you add to your profile become links that can be searched on. So, when I update my profile and added SICP to the list of favorite books, others who have that same interest can now find me.

Why hadn't this occurred to me earlier? This is simply brilliant.

This is probably also a great way to fish around for more interesting blogs to follow. Just pick an interest, and follow the search results to people who share that same interest.

For example, who knew that I would be connected to both Strawberry_wine (5'9" redhead, blue eyes, slender, outgoing, likes chatting and meeting people, discusses high school, marching band and a wicked feud with another gal her age) and Don (huge fan of W., has a link to Blogs4God in his margin, discusses the Muslim Question and Napoleon Dynamite) via various interests and movies.

Gosh it's a small world.

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