Blender with intelligent help suggestions.

If Blender detects that you are baking a lot of map then it could direct you to current documentation that is relevant to the often used subject matter.

If Facebook can pester me with targeted ads then I’m certain that DCC tools like the Blender toolchain could be adapted to such technology with relative ease.

(i)To start, there could be one link to a video on the topic.

(ii) A link to the developer docs

(iii)Also, a link to a long standing, informative thread that has a high rating on a site here on BlenderArtists.org or similar.

These three combined would cover most peoples’ effective learning methods.

What do you think?

How is going to build it.

I suppose that may start with some detailed conversation on how this would be beneficial as well as aspects of such tool which may prove to be a nuisance or hindrance to the workflow.

Google is fine but it’s not always clear what keywords to use or that a certain tool even exists.

Artist and programmers often have very different viewpoints when it comes to what is useful or relevant it would help to have the opinions of all types of thinkers for something like this to be most effective.

(A)Obviously, step one is that several levels of experience should be defined.
(i) Beginner
(ii) Intermediate
(iii) Power-User.

(B) Feel free to come up with step B

Really, step B could be your favorite tutorials or documentation pages. If all the best of the best learning resources for every aspect of Blender and skill levels are posted here than step 1 is completed.

People could even post snippets of Python and C code which may be useful for the actual implementation. This makes it much easier for that special gifted someone to come along and tie up all the loose ends since all the grunt work is done.

“If Blender detects that you are baking a lot of map then it could direct you to current documentation that is relevant to the often used subject matter.”

“If Facebook can pester me with targeted ads then I’m certain that DCC tools like the Blender toolchain could be adapted to such technology with relative ease.”

I don´t want to be pestered! When I do batch baking, let me do that without interruptions.
just contribute to the documents/wiki.

Obviously, if Blender detects you doing a lot of something, then you already know how…

Targeted ads are different than helping you with something. Targeted ads are trying to sell you something. You may consider someone pestering you to buy something to be the same as getting some help, but many would disagree.

If Facebook can pester me with targeted ads then I’m certain that DCC tools like the Blender toolchain could be adapted to such technology with relative ease.

Those targeted ads work by comparing your personal data against a massive body of data collected from other users, often through a machine-learning process.

What you would need to do is to record all user input, then have them find (and mark) an answer in the docs. Over time, you will strengthen a (fuzzy) relationship between user input and documentation, which could be queried for something like suggestions.

It would be interesting to see how well this works, but it would require a lot of data mining, over a wide spectrum of user behavior.

Ok. I can see that metaphors, analogies and parables cause problems.

Good grief, what I’m describing is an inter-Blender community news/interactive help and documentation.

I should have been more clear. When I said targeted ads I was attempting to describe how to adapt the algorithm to something that is not another stupid commercial system.

What I’m saying that is if people who know way more than most people are very interested in something then Blender could be made to notify everyone.

It is an information exchange that is heavily filtered which ties into Blender.

Cooperating websites BA.org, stack exchange, cgCookie could be crawled by a tool which is specifically designed to look for positive votes or like buttons . The results of the best then become notifications.

Obviously any of this can easily be enabled or disabled with a check box like most everything else.

Now everybody is current on what’s most important without having to crawl a dozens threads on a dozen sites.

If you want commercials, go for it, but at least I’d like to be able to shut them off entirely.

tools like the Blender toolchain could be adapted to such technology with relative ease.

Aren’t you aware of the amount of people and effort that goes into targeting? I bet there are dozens, if not hundreds of employees working only on that - user analysis is what facebook does and what they make their money with. And honestly, I wouldn’t want Blender to silently collect information about me and send it to Blender data center to analyse all users’ behavior and act upon the results…