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I don't know how this information would be aggregated, nor from where - so I think "no".

When one starts a site like this, it is full of people with deep knowledge. They surely are leaping to share that wisdom. How do we find what kinds of things they want to talk about? If I knew, I may ask questions that would educate me.

Like when I go to a networking event; if I know what someone's area of specialty I can ask them intelligent questions that broaden or buff my knowledge.

I know that profiles could be used for this, but most don't fill them out, and they're not easily accessible regardless.

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Once a user has participated even a little, the system is very good at figuring out what tags the user is likely to be interested in. There's a whole ton of theory behind how the system does that, even I can't quite wrap my head around all of it. But, yes, it does use tags as a major indicator.

There's other signals too, such as the tags that you select as favorites, or tags that you elect to ignore. The more input you provide through doing that, or just asking and answering questions, the more tuned the front page of the site will become for you.

This of course also depends on overall site activity, so it won't be as pronounced as it could be while you're still bootstrapping tags. Still, there's definitely enough here for it to be noticed, as you have.

Similarly, the broader the sampling of content that is categorized, the more accurate the automatic tag prediction (which suggests tags when you ask questions) will become.

That's actually a feature that is perhaps so discrete that not many really even notice it, but I personally think it's one of the more awesome features that the engine totes.

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  • $\begingroup$ I understand what you wrote, but I didn't read how any of this algorithmic-awesomeness is exposed to users. $\endgroup$
    – New Alexandria
    Jan 5, 2014 at 21:01
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I noticed that the list of top users includes a few of their most-used tags.

It's a start.

Sorting it by-week shows who, and which interests, are the most active in recent times

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During the beta phases the best way to find out what kinds of questions we want to answer (or the kinds we can answer) it to ask them. We need the questions, and if we don't know the answer we may be able to recruit a new participant who does.

If you're interested in what kind of expertise a particular user has, remember that as the site grows users will get "tag badges" which are the site's way of saying "This person has a lot of upvoted answers in this tag. They probably know what they're talking about." That's probably the closest thing to what you're talking about that's conveniently available through the public UI.
(For an example check out my Server Fault profile -- the Tag Badges are the ones with a silver background instead of a charcoal background).

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