Thread disappear? Halp?

July 4, 2012 1:52 AM

Can't find a very recent post about kindle allowing amazon and / or publishers to see exactly how people are reading books - can anyone point me in the right direction? Am I just going crazy?
posted by ominous_paws to MetaFilter-Related at 1:52 AM (22 comments total)

http://www.metafilter.com/117490/The-Holy-Grail-of-Publishing-Metrics?
posted by hardcode at 2:03 AM on July 4, 2012 [1 favorite]

Lovely. Much obliged!
posted by ominous_paws at 2:15 AM on July 4, 2012

Pro tip: If you know it's a very recent post and you can't find it on the front page, try checking page 2.
posted by Sys Rq at 7:44 AM on July 4, 2012 [1 favorite]

Pro tip: If you know it's a very recent post and you can't find it on the front page, try checking page 2.

I'm baffled by comments like this. Do you honestly think this might be helpful or it is just amusing to snark?
posted by Lame_username at 8:10 AM on July 4, 2012 [6 favorites]

Yes.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 8:45 AM on July 4, 2012 [2 favorites]

Do you honestly think this might be helpful

Uh, yes? OP asked to be pointed in the right direction. There it is.
posted by Sys Rq at 8:52 AM on July 4, 2012

Other pointer in a helpful direction: FPPs tagged Kindle.
posted by DarlingBri at 8:55 AM on July 4, 2012

Ouch.

Honest to god I both tag searched and ctrl-f'd on the first 5 pages for "kindle", "amazon" and a few other key words. I, er, I was in a hurry?
posted by ominous_paws at 8:59 AM on July 4, 2012

Do you honestly think this might be helpful or it is just amusing to snark?

I read it as a little of both. It's genuinely helpful information, but the 'pro tip' (or 'protip') formulation seems like it might suggest some snarky intent as well. Or else that's just how people talk these days.
posted by box at 9:04 AM on July 4, 2012

Pro tip: put some of last night's leftover guacamole in this morning's omelet.

I'm about to jump up and do the Ed Lover dance.
posted by box at 9:08 AM on July 4, 2012 [1 favorite]

Pro tip: the dry daiquiri is one of the greatest cocktails ever created, bearing little to no resemblance to its more common cousin.

It may well have been deserved, but if Sys Rq's reply was not snark then I'll be... pretty surprised.
posted by ominous_paws at 9:12 AM on July 4, 2012

Of course it was snarky. Sorry.

Next time I'll be sure to be humourlessly finger-waggy.
posted by Sys Rq at 9:25 AM on July 4, 2012

Pro tip: the dry daiquiri is one of the greatest cocktails ever created

Recipe?
posted by hardcode at 1:58 PM on July 4, 2012

dry... as opposed to sweet? Would that just be rum and lime without the sugar? (A google search seems to indicate that it's a regular daiquiri with some bitters and passion fruit syrup.)
posted by Karmakaze at 3:46 PM on July 4, 2012

The dry daiquiri and the frozen daiquiri are both lovely in their own way, but the freeze-dried daiquiri was less successful.
posted by nebulawindphone at 10:02 PM on July 4, 2012

Speaking of snark and freeze dried, I think I once saw a sight for freeze dried water. Easy to store and travel with. Just add water when you get there!

Pro tip: Don't give your credit card number to the sight selling freeze dried water.
posted by AugustWest at 11:24 PM on July 4, 2012

Place I get them uses passion fruit and lime, which comes out tasting weirdly close to grapefruit. Really tart and marmaladey. So good.
posted by ominous_paws at 2:20 AM on July 5, 2012

Next time I'll be sure to be humourlessly finger-waggy.

Cheerfully constructive is also totally okay, for what it's worth.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:53 AM on July 5, 2012 [4 favorites]

People always, always use the wrong keywords, is why. Or they put them in tags but not in the title, or in the "more inside" but not in the description that is shown on the page.

Not finding posts is a function of a few of things:

1. the necessity of having these different fields in the first place
2. the disinclination of posters to repeat themselves in multiple fields
3. the idiosyncrasies of the MeFi search engine works (it doesn't appear to include words entered in the tags field as part of the search index)
4. the proliferation of many words/terms to talk about the same thing (only complicated by the presence of terms derived from brand names).

Best possible thing is to not feel embarrassed or get upset if you don't find something, because it is basically a deep systemic issue, not a failing of your searching skills, the poster's posting skills, or even MetaFilter itself. It's just the nature of a medium which features a huge amount of content entered by a vast number of people.

And in a sense, thank goodness, because how terrible would it be if we had to wait for Getty to create a full granular taxonomy for any new subject someone wanted to post about?
posted by Deathalicious at 8:07 AM on July 5, 2012

Note that in this case, you only would have found it if you had done a search for e-book. You could have searched for Kindle, Amazon, and ebook without turning up anything.

Maybe it would be worthwhile to include the relevant tags in tiny-text just under the post, like this.
posted by Deathalicious at 8:13 AM on July 5, 2012 [2 favorites]

So not to derail, but since it was my (first) post, is there a better way I could've used tags or made the post easier to find? I know that I included "kindle" (and forgot "Amazon") but the rest of the tags were a bit of an afterthought...
posted by antonymous at 4:48 PM on July 5, 2012

You did fine. As I said, this is intrinsic to the nature of posting Internet content. The only alternative would have been to spell the second e-book as ebook, which would have been jarring, and also including a direct reference to Kindle and Nook.
posted by Deathalicious at 11:03 AM on July 6, 2012