I’ve seen very similar responses from Matt all over the shop and my response is along the oft-quoted line of Christine Keeler. I’m amazed he isn’t dizzy from the spin.

Of course the opt-out percentages are low if he includes the two out of three blogs on WP.com which are inactive as part of his dataset (so the people who originally started them have no idea this feature has happened). How about accounting for the people who post less than once a week and thus haven’t discovered the feature is part of their blog now yet? Accounting for the people who haven’t yet had it serve up an unexpected porn link and thus don’t yet hate it as much as they soon will? etc etc Let’s see what the opt-out figures are a month down the line, and only include the active blogs.

Complaints about PRP are the most frequently started thread from n00bs currently on the WP.com support forums. A lot of even n00bier WP.com bloggers probably have no idea the forums even exist or how to use them despite the link in their Dashboard. More than one blogger thought that their site had been hacked when these strange links to other blogs showed up.

The idea is fantastic. The implementation not so much.

I don’t know Forth. And Smalltalk already has a mature blogging system
Oh, and most CL implementations compile to fast native code.

Anyway, does the implementation language matter to you as a user? I think PHP is the delayed result of a dog’s breakfast but millions of people use Wordpress et al.

Great to hear from you. Sphere.com’s analysis is, going by results, a failure. I’m running a piddly little service but wordpress.com has millions of blogs. Why aren’t you doing visit analysis a la Amazon?

4. Which is why I’m going to be writing my own blogging platform in good ol’ Common Lisp. Naturally I have dubbed the effort Project Wordpreth.

Jeez Jacques, why not Forth or Smalltalk? If you have to use a dead language, at least use one that somebody else can read the source

There are certainly problems where a computer can’t tell if you’re for feminism or against feminism and could connect you with someplace you don’t want to be connected to, but across the millions of posts on WP.com I can count the reports like Fire Fly’s on one hand. As you’ve said, we’re also introducing a blog filter so people can customize the results.

This isn’t really any additional work other than reading your own blog, which we all do quite frequently. If it seems like too much trouble, we provide an easy checkbox to turn the whole thing off.

Jacquess, the feature is actually powered by Sphere.com which does pretty sophisticated document analysis, is on over a billion pages across the web, used by most major media sites, and just sold to AOL for tens of millions of dollars. Nothing is perfect though, and we’ll be actively tweaking it based on feedback and clickstream data.

2. I’m actually launching a hosted service myself and was musing about a similar optional feature, but based on the Amazon approach of “see also”. Essentially “people who read this post also read …” for each post. I figure it could be done by log analysis rather than relying on simplistic word-matching. An example of ‘collective intelligence’, to borrow a current buzzword.

3. Installing the Wordpress Mu software helped me to rekindle my loathing and detestation for the coders of that software. For instance, Wordpress.com don’t share the one piece of code I really wanted — proper domain name mapping. The WPMU.org variant is retarded in that respect.

4. Which is why I’m going to be writing my own blogging platform in good ol’ Common Lisp. Naturally I have dubbed the effort Project Wordpreth.

For anything harder-core than it or its plugins can do, you’re better off with a custom app framework like Django or Ruby on Rails.

I had a look at my blog and there were no added links, so perhaps some themes don’t lend themselves to the service either.

It was only activated on late Friday our time, so that would have been after you published your last post. It only activates as you are using the edit-mode, so while you are drafting a new post or updating an older one then PRP will add the links to the foot of your post.

I had a look at my blog and there were no added links, so perhaps some themes don’t lend themselves to the service either.

Your last post was published before the feature was rolled out. The PRP feature will put links to other blogs at the bottom of your next post unless you disable it.

Another issue is that its algorithm for assigning relatedness seems to be kinda fubared. People are reporting only about 1 in 4 truly relevant linked posts on average. At least part of that is probably that most people don’t use tags properly, but in that case they need to give less weight to tags and more weight to categories, which most people are pretty careful about.

Friends don’t let friends use Drupal.

Not if WP or textpattern or blogger serve their needs, no. But if you actually want to have a multi-user site with more content than just blog-entries-dated-and-tagged, you’ve got to look a bit further afield for a decent CMS.
[whistles] I’m your pusher man…

Although I look great in a maid’s outfit.

GIF!!!!1!11!

Precisely. Although I look great in a maid’s outfit.

The little lady just scored a 2-level promotion in the Vic DSE, so the dream lives on…