Archive for the ‘1’ Category

Monday, June 11th, 2007

Site back, sorry for the outage.

Update: Clearly, we’re down again. John’s working on figuring out why the problem reappeared and how to fix it. Watch for updates on the home page (Abby)

The site is back up, after having being down for a day and a night. An errant script knocked down the “read” database, and when the box crashed, some of the db files were corrupted. This meant the whole db had to be restored from the master db. In addition to the db itself, some of the log files were also affected. Turns our MySQL is a lot more finicky about how log files are handled than I’d ever known, or hoped to know. After a lot of digging around, everything is back the way it belongs, and all that was lost is a night of sleep–no data was lost.

I’d like to apologize profusely to everyone who was inconvenienced. We’ll put more safeguards into place to try to minimize such outages in the future, hopefully.

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Monday, June 11th, 2007

Downtime

We’re really sorry about the downtime, folks. We’re working hard to get the site back up and running, but it’s taking longer than we’d like. We’ll keep you updated as soon as we know more.

In the meantime, here’s something to do while you wait! I want a new and entertaining bookpile to go on the down page. The rules of this impromptu bookpile contest:

1. Post your pictures to Flickr
2. Tag them “LTdown” (feel free to post the link to your photo in the blog comments here if it doesn’t show up right away)
3. Wait for us to pick a winner.

Update 5:11 pm Eastern: We lost the main “read slave.” No data was lost. (We have five copies at all times.) But are missing a critical machine, and have to rebuild it. John is working to rebuild the machine. I suspect it will not be up tonight.
More updates on the homepage

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Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

TagsAhoy!

LibraryThing’s John McGrath has debuted a new site, TagsAhoy, with a wonderfully simple idea: searcing your tags across multiple sites.

Cross-site tag searching is nothing new; sites like Technorati do it all the time. But TagsAhoy searches your tags, not someone else’s. If you tag a lot, it will come in handy. And you’ll wonder why nobody thought of it before.

So far, TagsAhoy searches LibraryThing, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Gmail, Squirl and Connotea. More will come, and John has promised tag clouds and other cool features. Pattered somewhat on the spare design of another of his sites, Wordie (“LibraryThing for words,” “Flickr without pictures,” etc.) TagsAhoy is super-simple to use.

We at least applaud the name. It’s clunky in the way “LibraryThing” is clunky. Or was. Now all the “-Thing” names are bought up and my sub-Lovecraftian joke is almost trendy. We confidently predict “-Ahoy” will be the next “-Thing”*, or even “-cio.us”, “-r,” “-ster” and “-Space.”**

John recently moved to New Jersey and will be transitioning gradually off LibraryThing work over the next few months, as we look for a new PHP programmer with systems skills (job announcement to be posted soon). With TagsAhoy and whatever else his fertile mind creates, Abby, Altay and I wish him well.

*Research suggests PornAhoy.com is an expired domain. It sounds like a site for people who enjoy watching naked people on boats very very far away. There’s a market for everything.
**John suggests a site of just Web 2.0 suffixes, ThingAhoySter.

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Friday, May 25th, 2007

See all a work’s tags

LibraryThing members have added well over 18 million tags. Of course, they aren’t equally distributed. Popular books now sport thousands or even tens of thousands of tags. Work pages have a small tag cloud for each book, but it only shows the most popular thirty or so.

So I added a link to show all tags for a work. It shows the whole “long tail.” It’s very long indeed. It’s stunning.

Here’s Freakonomics with the standard tag cloud:

Click “show all tags” and you get around five pages of tags. Here’s a piece of that:

If you want to see the actual numbers, you can click the “show numbers” link.

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Monday, May 14th, 2007

LibraryThing for Libraries in Danbury

“You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!”

Over in Thingology I’ve announced the first library to use LibraryThing for Libraries—The Danbury Library in Danbury Connecticut. Works, recommendations, tags—they’ve got it all.

I’ve said I wouldn’t do as much cross-posting, now that we have a combined blog feed (see over on the right). But I thought I’d mention it here, and explain a bit about what it means for LibraryThing.

First, as members of LibraryThing, you should feel proud that your data—anonymous and aggregate, as the Terms of Use say—is helping library patrons to find books. Your passions—the books on your shelves—beat statistical “paths” through books that others can follow. Your tags–the way you think about your stuff–will help people find subjects not covered by traditional subject classification.

For those concerned about development time, I want to emphasize that LibraryThing for Libraries is good for LibraryThing. On the most basic level, it’s going to help our bottom line. That means more programmers making features and fixing bugs. Conceivably, it could mean cheaper accounts.

It also deepens our relationship with libraries, and returns a favor. LibraryThing was built on library data, and we’ve been graciously invited into the library conversation. We are charging for LibraryThing for Libraries, but our prices are in an entirely different league from what libraries are accustomed to pay for their online catalog software. And as these catalogs add “social” features, LibraryThing for Libraries will exert powerful downward pressure on prices. Ultimately, the industry needs a newcomer to take a huge slice of a smaller market. We’re not going to be that company, but we can push the trend along.

LibraryThing for Libraries has also taught us a lot about library catalogs. These are some thorny, mysterious systems! Until now, we’ve relied exclusively on the simplicity of Z39.50 connections, which most libraries don’t have. But we can do more. With out new-found experience, we can start connecting to the remaining 95%. If nothing else, this should help our language reach.

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Wednesday, May 9th, 2007

A very short introduction

At long last, the often requested quickstart guide—A very short introduction to LibraryThing.

It’s intended as a quick overview of LibraryThing’s features, to help new members get started, all the way from signing up to creating a blog widget. It’s hard to come up with the balance of enough information to help without overwhelming, so I’m looking for your feedback. What should be added, changed, deleted, clarified…?

Discussion in this talk post.

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Monday, May 7th, 2007

Going to Book Expo America in New York

Book Expo America, ABA’s annual book industry trade convention is in New York City this year, and I (Abby) am going to be there. I’ll be speaking on Thursday, May 31st (from 1-2pm—mark your calendars!) on a panel called “Using Social Networking to Build Author Brands.”

We just found out that the our competitor, Shelfari, is also going to be at BEA this year, and is apparently using some of their Amazon funding to co-sponsor an event. Hey! Well, not only does LibraryThing appear to have sixty-five times as many book lovers as them, but we think we have a lot more to offer authors, booksellers and publishers and we’re going to prove it.*

Authors. It was at last year’s BEA that we launched the LT Author program. After Tim and I spent a day walking around trying to describe LT in a nutshell**, we realized we had been telling people, “it’s like MySpace, but for booklovers.” Well, MySpace is all about bands and musicians promoting their music. Wouldn’t LibraryThing be a good place for authors to do the same? What better place to promote your new book than a website full of avid bibliophiles?

And so was born the LT Author button, a shiny yellow badge that connects an author’s “author page” with their profile page. So far LibraryThing has snagged 395 authors. (See the complete list.)

Best of all, they’re not just authors who clicked a box. To be part of the program, you have to have a LibraryThing account and put in at least 50 books. What is your favorite author reading? Find out.

Neil Gaiman’s author photo. Members have added over 15,000 pictures and photos of authors (see recently added ones), with alibrarian and leebot leading the pack. They deserve some kudos—it’s actually a pretty intensive process, often involving writing authors, publishers, or photographers for permission, so the sheer number of photos is all the more impressive. Plus, it makes for a nice gallery. 🙂

LibraryThing members have also added over 92,000 links to author pages—links to author home pages, blogs, publisher pages, Wikipedia pages, interviews, articles, fan sites. That’s a lot of links.

Booksellers. We’d love to add more bookstores to our “bookstores that integrate“—adding availability and pricing information on every work page. We’ve got only three so far, but we’ll be adding two major “chunks” of them in the next few months—to at least 100 total. It’s a great way for people to be able to see at a glance if a book is at their local bookstore.

Publishers. So far, we’re not doing anything for publishers! But there’s a big announcement coming soon. Be on the edge of your seats!

So what can we do to make LibraryThing big at BEA this year?

Our big idea so far is a par-tay. Of course, anyone and everyone can find some time to talk to me during BEA, but I’d like to have a big meet-up. Authors, publishers, booksellers, and hey—readers. Anyone in NYC who’s around is invited, not just the book-industry professions allowed to go to BEA (they have to restrict it, because there’s so much free merchandise on offer.)

I made a BEA 2007 group, post there with ideas of where we should meet (I’m thinking maybe a restaurant near the convention center?). New Yorkers, I call on you for suggestions!

We’re also thinking about bring a bunch of CueCats, and giving them out to authors, to entice them into becoming LT Authors… What else?

*[Written by Tim] Shelfari doesn’t release any statistics. But they do release the top 20 bookshelves. The 20th bookshelf on Shelfari has 1,360 books. LibraryThing has 1,378 members with that many. Hence 20/1,378 = 68.9 times as large. You will note that we do not abuse our other competitors–just Shelfari. Some of them are quite good! There’s a good thread going about them. We want people to check them out, and come back to tell us how to improve LibraryThing!
**”This is me in a nutshell: HELP! I’m in a nutshell!”

(photo by Rick Dikeman on Wikipedia, under GNU Free Documentation License)

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Monday, May 7th, 2007

Subjects get faster; the rest will follow

Everything on the web is better if it’s faster. Slow pages are a silent killer.

So we’re working to speed thing up. We’ve long done “situational” caching. But our growth is relentless—we’ll hit 200,000 registered members today—and we’ve had no good, generalized solution. We’ve recently been working on two solutions, for database and page-level caching. Together they should speed up certain cacheable pages, like works, authors and tags. The more resources we can free, the faster the uncacheable pages, like Talk, will become as well.

So far, only subject pages are being cached, eg.,

Subject pages were a big problem. The worst took a minute to load. When Google’s “spider” program went at them, with one request/second, the servers would sweat. Subject pages are now cached whenever someone hits a page, and stays so for at least week.

Subjects are a test. There are some kinks to work out. (For example, changing the non-English translations doesn’t immediately clear all affected pages.) Once we get where we want, we’ll roll it out page-caching wherever we can use it. Query caching will follow.

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Thursday, May 3rd, 2007

Combined blog feed available

I used Yahoo Pipes to make a combined feed for this blog and our Thingology blog. It was easy to do, and the result is pretty useful. The three feeds are as follows:

I also edited the employee list on the right, to add Altay. He is the magic behind the LibraryThing for Libraries Javascript, but almost nobody’s seen that yet, so we’re waiting for his first user feature to give him a proper introduction.

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Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007

Many more Wikipedia citations

You’ll notice many more Wikipedia links from work pages. The total has increased by about 200%, and the coverage by at least that.

This improves what I did in February. That worked by looking for ISBN patterns. Of course, not all books cited in Wikipedia have ISBNs. And even when there is one, many Wikipedia contributors omit it. (As far as I’m concerned, ISBNs look chintzy in a bibliography anyway.)

I’ve redone it, this time also looking for telltale title/author patterns, and running the matches against LibraryThing’s vast and usefully messy dataset. The logic is somewhat fuzzy and therefore imperfect. But I haven’t noticed any problems.

The number of citations expanded a lot.* Some entries exploded. Take Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:

Notably, it caught casual references to books, not just structured ones. For example, the article on Science wars mentions Kuhn’s work in running prose, not in the bibliography or footnotes.

I haven’t updated our free Wikipedia citation feed. That maps articles to ISBNs, but the new data is work-based. If anyone wants to use the new data, let me know and I’ll tackle the problem. Cool as I think it would be, I haven’t seen any libraries adding Wikipedia links to their catalogs yet.

*The fact that its a new feed, and the somewhat fluid interactions between ISBN-based and work-based matching make it tricky to estimate, but it looks like a 200% increase.

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Friday, April 27th, 2007

Metacritic links added

I knocked out a quick feature connecting LibraryThing works pages to their corresponding page on Metacritic. Metacritic is like RottenTomatoes, giving brief excerpts from press reviews and boiling them down into a single number (the “Metascore”). Unlike RottenTamatoes, Metacritic covers more than movies. Here’s an example from Sam Harris’ The End of Faith.

Metacritic’s books coverage does not seem as strong as some other categories (560 ISBNs total), but I think it’s useful and interesting. Perhaps some day LibraryThing will collect review snippets itself, but for now Metacritic should be a useful link.

Metacritic was informed of what we were planning, but no money changed hands. Hey, who can turn down a free link?

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Saturday, April 21st, 2007

Tanned, rested and ready

I’m flying back from four talks in four days—Computers in Libraries (twice), the Library of Congress, and Digital Odyssey in Toronto.

The Library of Congress talk was videoed, and will be public in a couple weeks.* It was great fun to do. (Who could pass up the chance to discuss the tag vampire smut with some of the world’s top catalogers?) And as a long-time user and admirer of the Library of Congress, it was quite an honor. I pushed them hard on openning up their data, and the shortcomings of the LC subject system, but they were good natured about it. And my anti-OCLC feelings drew no fire. As one of them put it, only half-kidding, “They wouldn’t be anything without us.”**


Derik A. Badman’s cartoon of Roy Tennant (left) and me (right) giving talks. Actually, Roy’s example was about murdered midget gypsy prostitutes. Well that’s three conferences he won’t be invited to!

At CIL I got a lot of opportunity to show off LibraryThing for Libraries, our new push to put LibraryThing data into library catalogs. Response was positive, even fevered.*** Demos went well, showing book recommendations and tags in a large public library. (“Chick lit” and “cyberpunk” are great examples, but I have to size people up quickly to know which one to use.) There was a certain amount of disbelief about its coolest feature–no back-end integration and working with any system. But anti-system-vendor sentiment is so high that this was welcomed. The first round of libraries should be at least a dozen strong, with both academics and small and large publics.

The highlight of all three conferences was the chance to puts faces to names, often names of blogs. My Google Reader feed is suddenly full of people I know! (But if I start listing I’ll surely forget someone…) I had a couple good meals, one good argument, a great lunch conversation at the LC and, as a coda, a stroll around Toronto.

(later) I’m off the plane now and in D.C., staying with friends for a few days. There’s a lot left to do for LibraryThing for Libraries, but the big initial push is over, and we can throw time back into building new features for LibraryThing. A number of them will revolve around JavaScript. Altay, our new JS guru, will be rolling out some serious magic.

*Among other things they need to synch it up with the “slides.” But I do my talks live, driving around at breakneck speed. The staffer assigned to coordinate the synch looked positively frightened.
**I owe a blog post revising my post about OCLC and MIT. Apparently OCLC didn’t stop them, but MIT legal.
***I came back from one talk to find the booth table littered with business cards. I felt like an NBA star at a nightclub.

Conference coverage:

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Tuesday, April 17th, 2007

5¢/patron, $1/student

From now on if a public library or a college or university wants to buy memberships for everyone in a community, it’s 5¢/patron, $1/student.

(see Thingology)

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Thursday, April 12th, 2007

Drop Everything and Read

No really! One of my favorite bookstores* reminded me that today is “Drop Everything and Read Day”. Sponsored by Ramona Quimby, of course, and celebrated on Beverly Cleary’s birthday. So go to it!

*Harvard Bookstore. They rock.

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Monday, April 9th, 2007

Sneak peek: LibraryThing for Libraries

Over on Thingology I give a sneak peek of the upcoming LibraryThing for Libraries feature—putting LibraryThing in library catalogs.

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Friday, April 6th, 2007

Business 2.0 does the LibraryThing

Business 2.0 finally posted its article about LibraryThing “Beating Oprah at the book club game.” Excellent article. (Terrible photo.)

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Sunday, April 1st, 2007

A new name, a new LibraryThing

Today’s farewell announcement by Library Stuff blogger Steve Cohen is sad news to many. But not to us at LibraryThing. Finally, the name we always wanted has come free!

After a quick round of emails I can announce that Steve has agreed to a complete buyout. LibraryThing has been renamed LibraryStuff.

With the move to LibraryStuff, LibraryThing increases its VMF or “Vague and Miscellaneous Factor,” important in appealing to its target audience—jaded catalogers and information architects sick to death of the cut-and-dried certainties and voodoo-ontology of the Dewey Decimal System and of Library of Congress Subject Headings. LibraryThing held out hope some sort of definite or even “real” Thing, a “false move” which left the Lib2.0 cognoscenti shaking their heads about how the Man was telling them what to think. LibraryStuff promises no such certainties, just stuff. Don’t want the stuff? Fine, we’ll keep it.

The historic buyout brings Steve Cohen on board as legal librarian, book reviewer and resident namer. The terms of Steve’s buyout were not disclosed, but let’s just say Ari and Hallie are set.

First on Steve’s renaming list is our upcoming “Library Services” feature. We were planning to keep the generic “LibraryThing Library Services” name, but adding the tag line Make your OPAC Sing… with LibraryThing! but now that Steve is on board we can expect a major rethink—”Stuff for Libraries from LibraryThing,” etc. We also understand the name “Horizon” has also come free.

The decision to join up with LibraryThing finally puts to rest Steve’s lingering “payola” scandal. Back in August 2005, Steve unwisely accepted a free membership to the one-day-old LibraryThing. Since then, he has been forced to issue disclaimers every time he mentions the site. The scandal boiled over when it was revealed that LibraryThing allowed Steve to enter a family video into our Hanukkah Book Pile contest although the video included no books at all! Subsequent revelations that Steve has also acquired free accounts to Shelfari, Gurulib, Anobii and Amazon have only fueled the outrage. At this point, all he could do was cash in.

Update: Major developments also coming in from OCLC, Google, TechCrunch. Yes, the new logo is in Cooper Black.

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Monday, March 26th, 2007

LibraryThing on Second Life, a start

Yesterday’s hastily-announced Second Life LibraryThing social was a big success. Our friends at Bookmooch graciously allowed us piggyback on their weekly event, and, not surprisingly, membership overlapped a lot.

Many of the LibraryThing members were experiencing Second Life for the first time and arrived late and a little bewildered. (One also arrived naked, having taken off her clothes by mistake and finding it impossible to put them back on again.) We chatted about books and Second Life, and played with and admired the area. I gave out free LibraryThing t-shirts and made people “head boxes,” which float above your head showcasing one of your favorite books. (It’s basically a Second Life LibraryThing book widget—one we hope to make dynamic soon.)

The event ended by a number of members jumping to Info Island, the main library area on Second Life. After getting caught building things without permission, we ran into Lorelei Junot, the administrator there, who gave us a small but very central spot to build on.

Now, what do we do there? John, Abby and I have a lot on our plate right now, so we’re calling on members to help plan and develop our Second Life presence. I think the center of it should be widgets of some sort, not beautiful empty building. (Info Island is so built up that Lorelei was only able to allocate some 91 “prims” to build with, a very small number, but as Jason Fried says, “embrace constraints.”)

Come join the new Second Life group to let us know.

Pictures from the day:


Sitting at the picnic table together, wearing LibraryThing and Bookmooch t-shirts. Justin and I have head boxes. Bucky Tone (the Bookmooch founder John Buckman) faces the camera and hoists a champagne glass.


Shiva999 shows off her new bunny avatar, which does a very funny dance.


Two hours in it’s mostly LibraryThing people, dressed and undressed. Here we are gathering for a group picture.


Lorelei shows us the new LibraryThing plot.


Justin and I drinking next to the “coming-soon” obelisk.

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Friday, March 23rd, 2007

Mea culpa

… mea maxima culpa for the down time today. We had an idiotic technical glitch. The main “read” server got too full (350GB only seems infinite). Freeing up space was no problem; 80% were old log files. But we inadvertently changed permissions on a file which caused errors that “looked” like database corruption. Anyway, we learned our lesson, or at least a lesson.

All data is and was safe. Even if we lost that one, we have four more. And nightly backups.*

Thank you for your patience and support. John and I are going to go cry now.

*The topic of backups is high in my mind these days. My MacBook Pro’s hard drive died Wedndesday. I was amazed how little I lost. Five years ago, a hard drive crash would have sent me to the sanitarium. But LibraryThing is almost entirely online. I lost a few layered Photoshop files, and my Pando Calendar–which will be a HUGE pain to reconstruct. But all the programming is online, as are my emails, the Wiki we use for business documents, etc. That leaves some music—which I will feel no moral qualms at all about copying from the first person I meet who has it—and a season of Battlestar Galactica I wasn’t much interested in seeing again.

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Tuesday, March 20th, 2007

Customize your book links

We just added the ability to edit the “Find At…” links that appear in the left-hand column on book pages, under the cover image. The link options include bookstores, book-finding services, publishers, swap sites, and hundreds of library catalogs from around the world. All together there are almost 500 options for ISBN-based services to choose from, and if we missed any, you can add them–the page for selecting links is itself editable.

If you don’t bother editing your links, the default set is selected based on your language–people viewing the site in French should see AbeBooks.fr and Amazon.fr, rather than their .com cousins.

Please let us know if you have suggestions for default links for the non-English sites, or other ways we can improve the links and this page. Given the staggering volume of contributions from LibraryThing members, this has the potential to become a very rich repository of online book services.

The current contents were derived from Wikipedia’s Book sources page. Both it and LibraryThing’s version are covered by the GNU Free Documentation License, so contributions will benefit the widest possible audience.

Update: We’ve opened a group, Book links questions and help, for people who want to make updates. We’ll add a helpers log soon.

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Thursday, March 15th, 2007

thingISBN data in a single file

thingISBNs—all of them—are now available as a single ginormous XML file. This should help people get around the 1,000-calls-per-day limit for using thingISBN API, make it easier to perform local processing on thingISBN data, and—hopefully—allow crazy stuff we haven’t even thought of. For more info see Tim’s full post on Thingology.

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Thursday, March 15th, 2007

“Wow, data is fun.”


There’s a nifty post over on the Google Book Search Blog where Google engineer Matthew Gray charts locations mentioned in books on a world map, and then filters by publication date into a series. Gray notes that it picks up the westward expansion of the United States. It picks up some other events too. The Scramble for Africa is noticeable, if from a largely British perspective.

I like the way he closes—”Wow, data is fun.” My feelings exactly. It’s why LibraryThing has five recommendation algorithms (not counting two I’m hiding). It’s why we have a “fun statistics” page that reports on users with whom you share the only two copies of a work on LibraryThing (the much misunderstood Vous et nul autre feature). It’s why I’m giddy that LibraryThing has the largest collection of book tags on the web.

But not everyone has query-level access to LibraryThing’s data. We need to get more out there, so members and passers-by can play with LibraryThing’s increasingly rich dataset as I do. We’ll have some news on that front soon.

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Monday, March 12th, 2007

LibraryThing reading and party tomorrow!

Tomorrow (Tuesday) night, LibraryThing will be hosting a party!

Kevin Shay—first-time novelist, long-time essayist and humorist, hacker, high school friend of mine—is going to be reading from his novel The End as I Know It: A Novel of Millennial Anxiety.

The reading is at 7:00 at Longfellow Books in Portland, ME (Google map). After the reading (8?), we’ll be hosting a liquor-and-cheese party at the LibraryThing offices. Anyone familiar with the parties that Lisa and I used to throw will know the kind of Martha-Stewart-meets-Burning-Man event we’re talking about here. Unfortunately, I’m planning it, not Lisa, so there will be no oregano goat cheese balls. But you’ll get to talk to Kevin, meet the LibraryThing crew (including the new mystery employee)!

Here a review by the L.A. Times, and here’s the flap copy:

It’s 1998. Or, as Randall Knight sees it, Y2K minus two. Randall, a twenty-five-year-old children’s singer and puppeteer, has discovered the clock is ticking toward a worldwide technological cataclysm. But he may still be able to save his loved ones—if he can convince them to prepare for the looming catastrophe. That’s why he’s quit his job, moved into his car, and set out to sound the alarm.

The End as I Know It follows Randall on his coast-to-coast Cassandra tour. His itinerary includes the elementary schools that have booked him as a guest performer and the friends and relatives he must awaken to the crisis. When nobody will heed his warning, Randall spirals into despair and self-destruction as he races from one futile visit to the next. At the end of his rope, he lands with a family of newly minted survivalists in rural Texas. There, he meets a woman who might help him transcend his millennial fears and build a new life out of the shards of his old one.

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Sunday, March 11th, 2007

Better internationalization

Important! We know that most non-English speakers are not listed under their language. Until translation was added, all members were counted under LibraryThing.com, and a majority of non-English-language visitors still come through the English-language site. You can always come through any site, but if you speak a language besides English, go ahead and edit your profile to indicate what that is. You’ll improve the site for yourself and for others.

As many of you know, LibraryThing is now available in more than a dozen languages, from German to Welsh (complete list). The core of this effort was effected by LibraryThing’s members, who have translated our 1,500+ snippets in a wiki-like manner. (The work has been shared on the larger sites; the Welsh translation is largely the work of a single, heroic user, Dogfael!)

Translation is great—a triumph of passionate users run amock—but it isn’t enough. So today I’m unwrapping a bunch of features aimed at “localization,” giving members data on the trends in their language community, and giving them tools to find and connect with their linguistic brethren.

  • Language-specific Zeitgeist pages. The Zeitgeist tab now includes a “by language” sub-tab, taking you to stats and trends for German, French, Dutch and the other languages. For some the top ones, the statistics are already interesting. For Lithuanian and it’s one member, not so much!
  • Language-specific Groups pages. The Groups tab now includes a “Language groups” sub-tab, for all the Groups in French, Spanish, Latin, etc.
  • Language groups. Groups can now belong to up to two languages—quite a few are already bilingual. Abby went ahead through the existing groups and did some spot assignments, but may have missed some. If they’re yours, you can edit your group to change the language. If they’re not, and they’re not changing, send us a note and we’ll see what we can do.

These are hardly the last changes. I am part-way through refinements to Talk that take languages into account. John is working on language-specific book and library links on work pages. And there are search problems, untranslateable “snippets” and other issues that need work. But we’ve made some progress. In a little time and with your help, LibraryThing will be as fun and compelling in Estonian as it is in English.

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Thursday, March 8th, 2007

March book pile contest(s)

Well, it’s hard to imagine that spring is close (at least here in Boston, where it’s ranged from almost 60 to under 10 degrees in the past week alone), but I think it’s time for our next book pile contest. We’re particularly fond of March here at LibraryThing—all three of us have March birthdays!

This is another combined contest. March is Women’s History Month, and I’d love to see celebratory book piles!* Gather your women’s history books, books by your favorite female historians, throw in Jane Addams or Simone De Beauvoir for good measure, and pile away.

We’d also like to see your spring related piles—I can’t wait for spring to come in full force, so give me gardens and ducks and mud. And books, of course. (But not muddy books, please.)

The rules: Post your photos to Flickr. Tag them “LibraryThingMarch”. If your submission doesn’t show up on the global tag page here, (Flickr sometimes waits to post photos from new accounts), post your URL in the comments here.

The deadline: Saturday March 31st at noon, EST.

The prizes: One winner will receive a $50 gift certificate to Abebooks (sponsored by a recent user donation – thanks!). Two runners-up will get an yearly gift membership to LibraryThing.

Our last contest winner (from the 10 million books/valentines/presidents bonanza), madinkbeard is currently waiting for the mail to bring their prize—a slightly over one hundred dollar copy of Cy Twombly: A Monograph from Abebooks.**

Looking for inspiration? Check out past winners in our book pile archive.

Update: Since March is also Small Press Month, we’re including that in this contest too. Book pile away!

*And today is International Women’s Day! The LOC has a great page linking to some of their women’s history collections—I love their women and war collection (though I wish there was more from WWI, since that’s my pet research area).
**Apparently other potential expensive book choices included Krazy & Ignatz: The Complete Sunday Strips and Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays, but the art monograph won out.

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