(Thanks to genebreshears for the idea for this entry)

So, I don’t know if anyone has ever looked, but a while back (and occasionally again since then) I had fun dumping everything I could think of into my interest list. When they announced the cool Interest Matching service on paidmembers last week, I had a little fun and thought I’d see who came up on my list (note: I think this service is only for paid members right now). Interesting. I think that the “magic index” has less to do with how many similar interests you have with a person than the number of similar interests divided by the number of people who list those interests. Thus, if you like, for instance, “food” and 23,192 other people like “food”, this would give a low index number. However, if you like “chocolate-covered mothballs” and only three other people list that as an interest, the index would be much higher.

So, what did I get?

# User Magic Index
1 julesong 73.361
2 ramalion 25.598
3 artemisfur 22.551
4 rhiannonstone 22.330
5 cider 21.506
6 yendi 20.356
7 mirkowuff 20.074
8 folkfans 20.012
9 laurel 18.477
10 lyssrose 18.156

This is pretty amusing, really. julesong isn’t such a big surprise, since I kind of copied and trimmed her interest list to get mine started 🙂

ramalion, artemisfur, and mirkowuff are all furry friends – I’m not surprised they showed up.

rhiannonstone, cider, and lyssrose show up just from the sheer number of overlapping mundane interests (cooking, chocolate, recipes, travel, etc.)

folkfans is a community that shows up since I listed several of my favorite bands (Moxy Fruvous, Nightnoise, Steeleye Span, Silly Wizard).

Finally, yendi and laurel are folks I recognize from the old Leadheads mailing list (Boiled in Lead fan list) that I dropped off of, um, four or five years ago. Funny how the net can be so big yet so small…

Oh, and for other friends, I would note:
13 herefox 17.002
18 daveqat 14.921
43 kittylad 12.404
47 sora_kitsune 12.117
70 tahamaki 11.133