Vote for LibraryThing in Mashable’s Social Networking Awards. (You vote by leaving a comment.) We’re in the “niche” category—I lobbied unsuccessfully for a social cataloging section—together with sites like CafeMom (“a place for moms”)*, SneakerPlay (MySpace for people who care about sneakers), Share Your Look (MySpace for fashionistas), AdFemme (MySpace for women in the advertising industry), NextCat (MySpace for actors, makeup artists and other Hollywood types), MyChurch (Facebook for congregations), Dianovo (MySpace for environmentists)**, our good friends Wordie, LibraryThing for words, and our favorite site, LibraryThing (SneakerPlay for booklovers).

*It’s depressing how much most “niche” sites ape MySpace.
**And people who enjoy splash screens. There’s also BeGreen, which is focused on global warming, but sports a front-page photo of two hot women standing in stylish red 60s or 70s convertible which is surely not a hybrid.

The audiobook of John Hodgman‘s The Area of My Expertise* is available for free on iTunes.

* Full title: An Almanac of Complete World Knowledge Compiled with Instructive Annotation and Arranged in Useful Order by Me, John Hodgman, a Professional Writer, in the Areas of My Expertise, which Include: Matters Historical; Matters Literary; Matters Cryptozoological**; Hobo Matters; Food, Drink, & Cheese (a Kind of Food); Squirrels & Lobsters & Eels; Haircuts; Utopia; What Will Happen in the Future; and Most Other Subjects; Illustrated with a Reasonable Number of Tables and Figures, and Featuring the Best of “Were You Aware of It?”, John Hodgman’s Long-Running Newspaper Novelty Column of Strange Facts and Oddities of the Bizarre
** Two people have tagged it cryptozoology, seven hoboes.

Hat tip: Neil Gaiman

Quick reminder: Post your Hanukkah book-pile photos to Flickr, tagged LibraryThingHanukkah. Winner gets a gift account. So far, we have only one book pile, with dreidels, and two not-very-booky entries (some very nice sufganyot and a family video from Steve Cohen at LibraryStuff). Deadline is 3pm Thursday, Dec. 21.

Feature teaser: It won’t make the end of Hanukkah, but LiveJournal and MySpace users should get a nifty, widgety Christmas present. Send encouragement to Chris (chrisgann).

Feature teaser 2: LC Authority Records, babee. Send fried donuts.

Neil Gaiman (American Gods, Neverwhere, etc.) has mentioned LibraryThing on his blog before, but today’s entry really caught our eye. It wasn’t just that he might join up, but he wrote a dead-on explanation of Unsuggester and what statistics mean and what they don’t. Here’s his reader’s email and his response:

Neil, I think the unsuggester might be broken. I’ve tried multiple titles, including yours, and there is always at least one or two items from my library on the list…

It’s not broken, it’s simply pointing out statistical anomalies—it’s not even talking about whether or not you’d like something (as some people have written to me, complaining they like books from both lists). It’s simply saying that it ought to be able to find a certain number of copies of book Y for people who own Book X, and it can’t. Statistically, people who have a copy of Mein Kampf on their shelves, for whatever reason, have fewer copies of Terry Pratchett books than might be expected. It may be that all the people with both Mein Kampf and Guards! Guards! just aren’t on LibraryThing yet, and once they join the anomaly will vanish. Or it may be that there’s something to be learned from that.

Would that he had been on Slashdot when that cry arose! Actually, part of the problem may be that people put their books in and try the Unsuggester the same day. But the calculations are pretty hairy, so I have to cache them for a while.

I don’t to “push” CueCats (cheap barcode scanners) too much, but when I dropped off the latest batch at the post office, I was told that Christmas delivery was getting dicey, even for Priority Mail*.

So, if you want to get your CueCats by Christmas, you’d better order them as soon as possible. Obviously, you can get a gift membership anytime.

*We don’t do Fedex. CueCats are a side-line for us; we intend to spend Dec. 24 shopping!