FYI, I'm here. Still brainstorming things.

Heh. Brainstorm.

Some suggestions for newbies:

- Check out the "Hot Reviews" and "New and trending" sections on the Explore page. Those are good places to find active bloggers.

- Add books to your shelves. I don't know about others, but one of the first things I do when I'm considering whether to follow someone who's followed me or who has commented on/liked one of my posts is to check what they've read and how they've rated it.

- Comment on posts. Don't be shy. :)

That's it for now, although I'm sure I'll think of more later. I wish the Explore page were set up better. If the genre categories actually limited reviews by genre, you could more easily see who's been posting, say, most of the cozy mystery or science fiction reviews lately.

To find people to follow: Pick a book you adore (preferably a kind of obscure one) and go look at the blogs of people who reviewed it. If they read stuff you like and post stuff you want to read, follow them.

What I don't know how to do is find new people who have joined who I should be following. Is there a way to see new people? If they read my genre (M/M romance) I would be happy to welcome them.

I mostly look for people that read similar books to mine and like to interact! I like book-blogging, so if someone isn't very active, or they don't respond to anything, I don't usually follow them.

I do the above as well, checking out shelves. I'm not into some of what others are but if they're posting it's fun to see what's out there. I have some followers who still don't have anything on their shelves but it says they were active within the month.

I also look under apps then under reading lists to see what people have put together. sometimes the ones that put together these lists have some great shelves to get ideas from.

Commenting on posts is also how I've found most of the people I follow, because when other people comment, I get a notification, & can stalk their blogs and figure out if they post with any reliability. The problem with blind following people I find from the book pages is that the vast majority of them are inactive, especially if the review is more than about six months old. I found a lot of interesting bloggers through other bloggers.

It might be that seeing what and who our friends like and follow in real time in the newsfeed (like Facebook and Goodreads) might boost us to follow too.

Reply to post #5 (show post):
What I don't know how to do is find new people who have joined who I should be following.

I would love it if there were a way to sign up for notifications when a new review is posted for a book we’ve read. If a new member joins and starts writing reviews for things we’ve read, we’d know right away that there was somebody new in town whose blog might interest us and we could follow them. Also, people’s tastes evolve over time. Maybe a long-time member has started branching out to a new genre and their blog might interest a whole new set of followers.

Reply to post #11 (show post):
That's a great idea. I like reading what others think about books I read almost as much as I like finding new & exciting books to read by reading other's reviews.

Reply to post #11 (show post):
YouKneek, great idea. Thanks for posting it.
I have a question for everyone. When members import their backlog, do you think we would want to get notifications of those reviews? I would like to see them, but if they had hundreds or even dozens, it might feel spam-like.

Hey everyone, based on all y'all's comments: here; on BookStooge's Does it Bug You? Post; and HFK's Think Tank Post, I've compiled a list to post in the BL Discussion Group. So that you all have a chance to vette it, you can view it here: http://redthaws.booklikes.com
Number 483

Ok, it's been posted in BL's group, and BL had already been listening. Not surprising. They didn't say so, but it sounds like this might be high on their priority list. We will be hearing more from them soon.

This has been so fun.
Still more to be done.
Thanks everyone.

ETA. Sorry that rhymed and I didn't mean for it to. Pretty dorky. Oh well.

Reply to post #16 (show post):
Thanks Hunger.
But not my suggestions. Everyone's suggestions.

Reply to post #13 (show post):
When members import their backlog, do you think we would want to get notifications of those reviews? I would like to see them, but if they had hundreds or even dozens, it might feel spam-like.

Hmm… good question, and I’ve been waffling back and forth on my answer because I really like to see everything, but I can also see where it would get completely overwhelming – especially for people who read really popular books and/or have thousands of books on their own shelves. I think it would depend on two things: 1) how we were notified and 2) whether or not we had any control over which books we were notified about.

Presumably the notifications could be turned on or off so nobody would be forced into them, but people who would otherwise be interested might choose to turn them off without a way to control which books they were notified about. Also, some people might want to see reviews for books they haven't read yet to help them decide whether they should read it soon whereas other people might not want to see those reviews for fear of spoilers.

If we received actual notifications like the ones we get for new comments, I think they would be more overwhelming versus some sort of a digest. It already gets overwhelming (at least to me) when we get notified about every single comment posted in a single thread as opposed to just getting one notification per visit. Too many notifications increases the risk that we’ll miss the things we most want to see.

My pipe dream would be to have a separate page I could go to on my own rather than receiving actual notifications and/or having it mixed in with my feed from people I've chosen to follow. I'd like something similar in concept to the “Reviews for Your Books” widget on LibraryThing, but with more control over which books show on the list, and without the entire review showing in the list. The page could only show the first couple lines of each review, in reverse date/time order, making it easy to skim through a large list and pick out the most interesting ones. With its own page, people wouldn’t get bombarded with notifications during a flurry of imports. They could just go to the page when they had time and read however many they had time for.

Also, I think I saw you post an idea in another thread about seeing an indicator next to people you’re already following when they post in the discussions. I love that idea, and it would also be nice to see that on the hypothetical “new review” page so you could focus more on reviews from new people you might want to follow.

Here are a few comments / ideas that popped up in the "new and underfollowed bloggers" thread, but which I think belong here as well:

* RedThaws, Spare Ammo, Carpe Librum and YouKneeK suggest an indicator on the newsfeed (in Comments, in Discussions, and on the newsfeed), that you do follow someone. Maybe it could happen when you hover over their icon, or there could be a little checkmark icon or some such by their name or name in a different color.

* Spare Ammo and YouKneek suggest an icon or something to indicate which remarks are new when you return to a discussion (especially in long discussions, it can be very time-consuming to find those responses that you haven't seen yet).