Comparing sources of interests
All sites that we used as a source for our Interest Matrix™ directly ask their users to list their interests. However, when you compare interests from various sources, the difference in frequency is astonishing (see graphs below). Users sometimes confuse interests with tags.
Wikipedia provides the following definition of Interest: “The interests of an individual in particular aspects of life, culture, and society which most attract his or her attention” and defines Tag as a label, “… used to describe an object…” It seems that there is nothing in common; however, a current internet tendency to put a tag on everything influences the way how internet users enter or even understand their interests.
Let us look at the usage of the word “bizarre”as an example. By definition, this is an adjective and therefore is more suitable to be used as a tag then as a specific interest. In our Interest Matrix™, the interest “bizarre” have cumulative frequency of 0.00001. However, on the graph from source 1 you can see that the term “bizarre” occupies the 5th place in top “interests” from this source.
It seems that sites that have nothing to do with tagging could collect much more “pure” interests. Nevertheless, each additional source of an independently collected interest adds up to 10% to our interest collection and should consider all additional sources, even with “bizarre” results.
