So this entry is going to seem really random. Too bad, deal.

When I moved into this new apartment like in January or thereabouts I setup my room. I sleep on a mattress on the floor. I know it’s weird, but I’ve been living like this for years. I don’t really see any need for fancy things like box springs and headboards right now. Maybe in the future. But for now a mattress on the floor is plenty good enough for me.

So when I put this mattress in my room it was placed snugly in the back left corner of the room against the two walls there.  And here’s where things get weird.

Over time the mattress has moved. At first it just seemed to have crept a little bit away from the wall. Fine I expect that, maybe when I’m cleaning or moving stuff around it might move a bit. But then it moved more and more. Every day a little further away from the walls I put it at.

During the early days I pushed it back into its proper place against the wall but then I decided out of curiosity to just go with it and see how far it would move on its own.

Now it’s like five months later and the mattress has moved clear across the room!

Not only that but I have this immobile bookshelf and in front of it there’s this plastic container on the floor where I keep papers. My bed has pushed itself right up agianst that plastic container crushing it against the bookshelf! Seriously the container is all deformed now. I’m afraid it’ll break right open under the pressure if I don’t do anything.

In addition since that corner of the bed can’t move any more it’s now started to rotate sideways, trying to move further and further toward the front of my room. Now my bed sits at this odd angle jutting out into the main part of my room. It’s like my bed is trying to ESCAPE!   It’s crazy weird.

I bet if my bookshelf wasn’t there my bed would have pushed its way clear into the closet  I’d wake up one day and my head would be in the closet. It’s so fricking weird!

And what’s really odd is that pushing that mattress along the floor is NOT easy. It requires quite a lot of force. It’s not like it just slips and slides on the carpet with ease. And sure I move around a little in my sleep but I’ve never noticed the bed move one inch just because I was moving around. 

I’ve had this same mattress in other apartments and slept on the floor and it hasn’t moved at inch. So this must be some combination of my mattress and this particular apartment or room. Perhaps my room is built with an odd slope. It doesn’t FEEL slopped to stand in it, but maybe it’s just not noticeable.

OR maybe there’s like an army of ants that come in and lift up my bed every day while I’m at work and move it an inch further away from the wall and the window.

OR maybe my apartment has ghosts! Polite ghosts who just give subtle signals that they want me out by moving my bed bit by bit.

OR maybe my mattress is sentient and just HATES this apartment and wants out of it as soon as possible.

OR maybe I like sleep walk and in my unconscious sleeping state I get up and move the bed all unbeknownst to me.

OR what?  I have no idea. One thing’s for sure I am NOT hallucinating. The bed really has moved clear across my room and I have all the physical evidence to prove it.

Shall I chalk it up to one of those mysterious unknown things that aren’t worth thinking about? Or do you my Xanga friends have a clear and obvious explanation that I am overlooking?

Well do they?

Please keep in mind. I’m not asking if you like recommendations or if you’re glad recommendations exist. I like them and I am glad they exist too. That’s not the point of this post.

I’m asking a different question.  Do they work?  Do they accomplish the ends they were initially set out to achieve?

The way I see it recommendations were supposed to serve three distinct purposes:

1. Promotion: allow a way to promote a site
2. Rating: establish which posts are “better” or at least more of interest to the community as a whole
3. Cost: create a “cost” to rating a post beneficial that discourages frivolous use or overuse

Have recommendations succeeded in these goals?

I’d say no.

1. Promotion:  Initially recs were very good for drumming up interest in a site. You could get a lot more views and comments based on recs.  Now it seems unless you have a very large number of recs you don’t get substantially more views or comments than you otherwise would. Over time recs have had diminishing effects because people have become de-sensitized to them. Originally they were new and cool and there weren’t a whole lot of them. Eyes start to glaze over when they see a rec now.

2. Rating:  Although there is a most recommended sorting option, it’s the Top Blogs ordering that determines who gets on the front page and seems to be what people use to judge what are the most popular entries.

3. Cost:  Do you even notice when someone is recommending too often?? I get so many recs day in and day out that I wouldn’t even notice even if it were happening unless someone just spammed recs all at once. A vast majority or recs I don’t view so it doesn’t matter if someone recs bad posts to me, I’ll probably not notice.  Have any of you ever de-friended anyone over recs? It seems to me that today people rec with impunity. There is no appreciable cost to doing so.

In their current form,, I think we can only say recs have achieved somewhere between 0.5 and 1.5 of these stated goals. I think with a few minor tweaks they can do better!

That’s not to say that recs are bad and should be scrapped. They shouldn’t. They accomplish lots of things. In particular they provide a nice filtering effect, enabling you to read only those entries written by a blogger that are most likely to be of interest to the largest variety of users and hence to you. Recs make it easier to keep your subscription list down to your very favorite blogs without missing things going on in the broader Xanga community.

But I think they can be even MORE useful than that.

With all those thoughts in mind I submitted a series of ideas that I think would help make Recommendations an even BETTER feature:

Quick Links to Other Recommended Entries

This is the one I think is most important. Basically it makes it easy to see what other posts a user is recommending. So if you can find out if you like the kinds of posts someone recommends. Likewise I through in the ability to see what other posts a user has had recommended of theirs. That’s just a nice way to draw up attention and drive traffic to some of your older more popular blog entries.

Subscribe to Rec Feeds

Really this goes hand in hand with the first idea. Once you discovered a blogger who recs things you like it’d be nice if you can make that blogger’s recs STAND OUT in some meaningful way so you can go back and look at them. Either you can tether this to the subscription system that already exists, so that anyone you subscribe to has a separate RECS feed visible in the subscription browser,  or you can make it an entirely separate feature.

Suppress or Block Recs

Obviously once you’ve identified reccers you like, it’d be nice to do something about those reccers you DON’T like too.

Rec a Blogger or Blog

Pretty self explanatory.  This won’t get cluttered cuz you can only rec a blog or blogger ONCE.  However you can and should be able to display all the bloggers you recommended.

Rec Button on Subscription Browser and Universal Inbox

Just to make things easier and more importantly to make the feature of recommendations more VISIBLE especially to new users.

RE-Pulse Feature

An effective alternative to recommendations for pulses. This combined with a Twitter Sync (and maybe an automatic url shortening service) I think would skyrocket the amount of pulse use as a means of disseminating information.

REC Statistics

It’d be nice to know how often your posts are recced so you can compare how you are doing to other popular bloggers. It’d be nice to be able to proudly display to potential subscribers how often your posts are recced too.

Show Rec Counts on Posts in Universal Inbox, Subscription Browser, Front Page, and Top Blogs

Fairly self-explanatory. If one of your posts is receiving a lot of Recs it should be very easy for anyone who happens upon your site to see that.

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After I came up with these ideas I decided to take a look through all of the Xanga ideas posted for other interesting Recommendation related ideas (I know I probably should have done this first to avoid duplication). I ended up finding a bunch and I only got all the way down to the ideas with a vote count of 8 or higher. Who knows how many more ideas there were to go through? Who knows how many gems there are with only one or two votes that nobody noticed?

Anyway, at least I can show you those that I did find so you can vote on them if you like them so that Xanga knows more about how to maximize the effectiveness of Recommendations.

OwenHiggins – Recommendation with Reason

slamjoe – De-recommend a Post

Simbathe2nd – Recommeding to certain users

juliebeanss – Recommend posts to certain users

Lithium98 – Opt-Out for Rec’d Posts

SpiderDad – Comment when recommending

vwagenjetta – Make Recommendations Meaningful

MagisterTom – Recs in footprints

Kontzicles – Limited Recommendations Per Day

radicalramblings – Undo Recommendation

chenmeicai – “My” Recommended Posts

pureboy123  – Recommend Comments

SucioFuego – Rec Entire Sites

vangelicmonk – Recommend Blog Entry to Friend

Xx_IWannaWWIIRomance_xX  – Recing

That’s it for now. I have a million ideas and there are hundreds of good ideas out there but just doing a few of any of these I think would be very helpful.

What do you think? Are recommendations working? Are they good enough? What if anything would make them better?