Today’s the publication date of Every Visible Thing, by LibraryThing author—and my wife—Lisa Carey (website). Every Visible Thing and LibraryThing are actually contemporaries—she was finishing it up while I was coming up with the idea. The fact that they both have “Thing” in their titles is, however, coincidental.*

Pre-pub reaction has been encouraging. Library Journal and Kirkus gave it coveted starred reviews. Entertainment Weekly just gave it a short, rave but somewhat gross review—Lisa’s prose is said to “blossom like a bruise”—and it won the September Elle magazine Reader’s Prize (not yet online). I’m very proud of her, let me say.

Check out her website or publisher for more. In brief, here’s the end of the flap copy:

“A moving, lyrically written novel that captures the darkness of adolescence and the complex relationships within a family, Lisa Carey’s Every Visible Thing is a story born of grief and disillusionment that is ultimately a testament to the power of hope, faith, and love.”

*Her title is from Augustine, mine from Lovecraft. Different, those two.

Popular, perky vlog MobuzzTV did a great piece on LibraryThing (third on, after the Al Gore cartoon).

Amanda Congdon (late of Rocketboom) has my vlog heart, and giggly Cali Lewis of GeekBrief is a guilty pleasure, but Mobuzz’s Karina is no slouch.

Except for the poisoning of John Blyberg*, the barbeque went great. We met lots of interesting people, established the superiority of Wild Oats’ “chocolate sandwich creams” by science and bought too much but not obscenely too much. Tim even managed to find someone to talk to about Greek twitch-divination texts. People drove from as far away as Providence, RI and Worcester, MA! Clearly we should do another in Cambridge, MA! (Date tba.)

Here are some pictures:

Axel, ready for fun

Liam, showing the colors

Tim, over his head

blind taste test

revelers

This is just a friendly reminder that tomorrow evening, Tim and I (and Chris Gann) will be available to grill burgers for you. Anyone in the area, please come by! Festivities will begin around 5. You’ll find us in the yard behind 28 Atlantic Street in Portland, Maine.

We want to meet you! Please come!
(end plea)

UPDATE: New feature of this feature–it WORKS!

Your profile now allows you to add links to yourself on some 30 sites and services, from AIM and Yahoo Messenger to MySpace, Skype, BookCrossing, even the “LibraryThings for wine” Cork’d and Winelog. Your already-entered AIM, Yahoo and ICQ names have been put into the new, more flexible system.

You will see a control like this when you edit your profile:

And here’s what it looks like on your profile.

I’m sure I missed some sites. As long as it has a user id-based URL, post it here and I’ll add it.

Christopher has put together an extremely elegant new search widget. Put it on your blog and your visitors can search your library–or a group library–without having to go to LibraryThing. Color and size it various ways. It works like a dream, with animated “expanding” action. You are not as sexy as this, and never were.

Try it over on the left, or make your own. (Note: These is on my library, not yours.)

There is, of course, no reason it needs to be on a blog. Put it on your home page, or that of your church, academic department, bowling league, etc. It even relevancy ranks the results. (It beats your OPAC and it’s the size of a half-eaten stick of gum.)

Lastly, we’re not taking any guff about trivial features. This is an amazing piece of work. There are literally thousands of blogs sporting our original LibraryThing widgets. They are a great thing for LibraryThing—one of the main ways people find us. I’ll go so far as to say that, without the widgets, LibraryThing would have never succeeded, and I’d be making websites for lobster canneries.

PS: If you watch the site closely (many of you do), you’ll notice some major changes. They are already significant and will get bigger and “deeper.” We’re not going to blog about them again until we finish up.

The 100th author to become a LibraryThing Author is Elizabeth Bear / matociquala, author of Hammered, and others. Congratulations to Elizabeth, who gets a free gift account for her lucky timing.

The LibraryThing Authors program, which we launched at the end of May, highlights authors who are also members of LibraryThing. The idea is that readers would love to see what their favorite author has in his or her own personal library.

Authors catalog their books (they have to enter at least 50) and then are given a special shiny yellow button, linking their personal profile with their author page. It gives readers a window into authors’ tastes, and authors a great new way to connect with their readers.

We’ve gotten a very positive response, and our list includes Rosina Lippi / greenery (who also writes under Sara Donati), Lisa Carey / axel, David Louis Edelman / DavidLouisEdelman, and many more.

Know anyone else who should be a LT Author? Send them my way! Tell your favorite author, your friends, your publishers, your pets…

*Don’t worry, when we hit 99 authors, I did start singing “take one down, pass it around…”

Update: The number of users in groups has almost doubled, but the Librarians who LibraryThing is standing firm at 22%. This is looking more and more like the true percentage of users who are librarians. I find this stunningly cool. Oh, PS: important new message display features on the way.

After forty-eight hours, we’re up to 270 groups.

714 people have joined at least one group. Even niches like Medieval Europe (18 members) and and Baseball (5 members) are reaching critical mass. Librarians who LibraryThing is the largest, with 169 members. This suggest that of LibraryThing users—or anyway it’s most active users—23% are librarians—take that, MySpace! 169 librarians can’t be wrong!!*

With that fact in mind, we need to reiterate that LibraryThing isn’t morphing into some horrible commercial or hook-up site. The amazing success of groups is testimony to a pent-up desire to relate around and discuss books on LibraryThing.** Reviews and profile comments weren’t enough—not enough by far. The forums we’re working on will extend that. But we haven’t forgotten the cataloging side, and will continue to improve our data and data models, expand our library horizons, and provide richer information for your catalogs.

Users have written 1,222 messages, which means Robyn and I need to release the “real” forum functionality soon! While we work on the cake, I added some frosting, RSS feeds.

* According to the ALA, there are 136,738 librarians in the United States alone. So, if 23% of LibraryThing’s 61,000 users are librarians, only 10% of librarians are LibraryThinging. In fact, it’s probably much less than that, as the librarians tend to stay and participate at higher levels.
** Not to mention the various families and suchnot putting their individual collection up mostly for searching purposes.

It’s now been just over 24 hours since we released the Groups feature, and we’re astounded at how it’s taken off. As Kevin Costner was once told, “If you build it, they will come.”*

We have 170** groups already, with a wild range of topics from Book Arts to Romance, from Austen to Byatt to Crusie. Librarians who LibraryThing took an early lead, and now has a whopping 82 members. I love it.

And there are 599 messages*** in the system – you apparently couldn’t wait to talk to each other (most active message board? Tea!). It’s a push for us (*cough*Tim*cough*) to finish up the more complex forum system (which will function on it’s own, but also be integrated into the Groups). I’ll let Tim eat dinner first, but then, he’s back to work.

Keep posting your comments on the GoogleGroup – as always, it’s a work in progress, so give us feedback.

(clearly, I’m picking up Tim’s blog footnotes tendency)
*I know that’s not quite the quote, but everyone gets the Field of Dreams reference, right? Well, now that I gave it to you…
**172 groups now, in the time it took me to write this
***and 612 messages!

Today we’re going public with a new Groups feature, a major new “social” feature. Groups were developed by Robyn, LibraryThing’s newest employee (and the last one hiding in the shadows, we promise). Check out the Groups homepage, all groups, or groups like Mainers and Knitters.

You can do three main things with groups:

• Search all members’ libraries at once. LibraryThing links accounts into a “virtual” combined library.
• Talk among the group. Groups come with a message board which demos LibraryThing’s new forum. The message boards demo the new forum features, including “touchstones.” Group forums will become “threaded” (more complex) later, if groups choose.
• Check out the Group Zeitgeist. Spot shared books, track recently-added books, etc.

We see groups being used by:

• Real-world clubs. Groups can unite all the collections of a real-world organization, like a book group, a college club, a branch of the SCA, a church—heck, a bowling league—search for books, arrange swaps, etc. You can even post meeting times, etc.
• Virtual clubs. LibraryThing members have already set up groups for Knitters*, British and Irish Crime Fiction, Ancient History enthusiasts, Pagans, and many others.
• Friends and lovers. You can set up a group for your friends, significant others and family members. You can make a group private and invitation-only.

Introducing Robyn. Groups were a grou—I mean team—effort, but Robyn took the lead developing the feature and coding it. Here’s a thumbnail bio:

Robyn Overstreet (LT: robynover) is a web developer and new media artist. Before joining LibraryThing, she worked as a web developer for the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations. She is a recent graduate of NYU’s Masters Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP)**, where she studied social software, as well as programming, design, and electronics. With a background in creative writing, Robyn’s interests include exploring the connections between formal poetry and computer programming languages. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Robyn’s email is RobynLibraryThing.com. She will also be posting on the Google Group and on the comments here. As usual, your comments are much appreciated. We don’t produce “finished” stuff and then ask you to like it or lump it. We produce something minimal and then see where you want us to take it.***

*The LiveJournal Knitters community were kind enough to start a day early, and provided valuable feedback.
**Clay Shirky, woo-hoo!
***For example, we’re not getting rid of the tags tab, apparently. It would have caused a revolution. I’m not even gonna talk about the 50-covers thing!

Announcing two new and super-easy ways to link from elsewhere to a LibraryThing book—simple links by ISBN and “sloppy title.” Some examples

http://www.librarything.com/isbn/0441172717
http://www.librarything.com/isbn/0380976749

http://www.librarything.com/title/voyage_of_the_dawn_treader
http://www.librarything.com/title/the+educated+imagination
http://www.librarything.com/title/tender violence

Why is this good? People—members and others—are increasingly using LibraryThing as their link-of-choice when blogging about a book. We are flattered, but think it also makes sense. LibraryThing “goes with the grain” of blogging. Like blogging LibraryThing is participatory and generous of external links—soon to get more generous. Many want to plug into that vibe, not just offer a place to buy the book.

The ISBN search works just as you might expect. (Note, however, that it pulls up the whole “work,” probably composed of a number of books, ISBN and not.)

The title search is the fruit of LibraryThing’s increasingly powerful data. It is quite tolerant:

http://www.librarything.com/title/Guns, germs, and steel : the fates of human societies
http://www.librarything.com/title/Guns, germs, and steel
http://www.librarything.com/title/Guns germs steel

All work equally well. Now and then the first guess will be wrong. Mostly it’s dead on. Oh, you can represent spaces as underscores, plus signs (+) or, in most editing software, leave them as spaces.

Let me know what you think!

*for example, giving Val McDermid’s The Mermaids Singing instead of my wife’s The Mermaids Singing. Val has more copies, but the wife should win. The fact that she doesn’t is testimony to my integrity! I don’t unfairly promote by wife’s wonderful books–available at all major retailors–through LibraryThing. Nor will I later this month when her newest novel, Every Visible Thing, is released.

LibraryThing hit 4 million books this week—that’s over a million in less than two months, and yesterday 42,000 more. We also topped 100,000 user contributed covers and 1 million unique books. We’re growing like crazy over here. And thanks to the new servers, the Zeitgeist is even updating regularly!

To celebrate (ok, we were planning it anyway) we’re having the first annual LibraryThing barbecue/picnic here in Portland, ME. You all are cordially invited – plan your vacations accordingly (Portland does have an airport, you can fly in just for the occasion).

We’ll have burgers and other things to grill (vegetarian stuff too, since Abby-the-vegetarian has a say) and potato salad and chips and whatever else you’re supposed to have at a barbecue. And you can meet me, and Tim, and our families – that right there should be incentive enough. Bring your babies and dogs, and we’ll see you in August!

Saturday August 5th, around 5pm
28 Atlantic Street, Portland Maine

You can RSVP (email Abby) or just stop by! Email for directions or questions or food requests.

We’ve opened a CafePress store, ThingStore, so now you can have all the LibraryThing schwag you could ever want. And we’re selling it at the CafePress base prices, so it’s as cheap as possible for you.

We’ve got t-shirts in different cuts and varieties, sweatshirts, hats, aprons, tote bags and messenger bags, baby clothes, mugs, and more! (You can even buy a LibraryThing thong—will anyone?)

Wear it, carry it, drink from it, or watch it crawl (with your infant) across your floor—proudly!

Stewie and Seamus, Chris’ dogs

Short version: We now have a three-server cluster. Speed has picked up. We’re hoping to solve lingering character set issues. A new employee, Chris Gann, set everything up.

Long version: Introducing… Chris Gann (LT: stalepez, chrisgannlibrarything.com), LibraryThing’s newest employee. Chris will eventually be coding, but his first task was to set up a “cluster” of powerful new servers to deal with LibraryThing’s current traffic, with a path to handling an order-of-magnitude increase in the future. He designed the architecture, ordered the boxes, set them up and arranged for the transfer from California. Chris is an old hand at this stuff. Back in 1999 he co-founded LinuxBox, a pioneering hosting facility for open-source projects, later acquired by OpenAvenue.*

The new servers have been up for almost two days—long enough to see that, at least as far as speed, things are shaping up. We’ve moved from one fairly modest server in California—a second one broke right before the Wall Street Journal article hit!—to three servers, two moderately powerful and one a “monster.” They are set up as a “master” and two “slaves.”** The master handles “writes,” the slaves “reads.” Read load is balanced between the two slaves, and they “fail over” to the other if something goes wrong. The system also provides increased data security, with complete database copies stored on three computers. It is also possible to take one server offline for backups without causing interruptions. I can also finally run statistics pages—the Zeitgeist particularly—without hiccups.

We saw an immediate improvement and speed has picked up as “caches” grew and as scripts were modified to take advantage of load distribution. (Maybe 1/3 of scripts have been rewritten, but they are the heaviest ones.) Between midnight last night and this morning, the master, “Zeus” had only three “slow queries” (11, 13 and 13 seconds respectively); everything else took less than 10 seconds. The slaves, Apollo and Athena, had zero and 12 slow queries respectively. That looked odd, so we dug into the code and discovered that the randomizing function was giving Athena too much work. I expect the number to drop as the load balances better. As for the servers presently in California, one will be charged with the worst queries—recommendations and relatedness—doing them on a schedule and caching the results. The second will become a development server, so when I try to run a “six degrees of Jane Austen” it doesn’t crash the database.

Oh, best of all, because of an order mixup, we have three more servers sitting in the LibraryThing foyer. As far as Dell believes, they don’t exist. They won’t let us send them back—the charge has been refunded too. I suspect they’ll eventually come to their senses and let us send them back. If not—hey—sever error in our favor!

Character-set issues. Users have reported problems with character sets. As the data transfer was binary, this is probably a configuration issue. (I believe the same thing happend before, and was fixed with a configuration change.) Chris is on the problem, and will report back here or on the Google Group as soon as he can.

We thank you for your patience. I can’t promise problems are forever over, but a significant step has been made. With luck, we won’t be firefighting all the time, and be able to push forward the site more.

* In a strange twist of fate, the co-founder of OpenAvenue, Jayson Minard, is now the CTO of Abebooks.
** As an American History major, these terms still give me the creeps.

I have made some various small changes to the catalog page and I wanted to give you a chance to offer some feedback on these and the new catalog in general (except color scheme, that is for another discussion). Leave your comments here or bring them over to the Google Group for more discussion.

• You can now search subjects via the catalog search box. Just select ‘Subjects’ in the drop-down menu.
• ISBNs are now included in ‘Book’ searches.
• Titles are now links to the social info page.
• Multiple fixes to lingering in-place editing problems have been applied. If you know of a problem that has not been fixed, please let us know. It’s better to have too many reports than to have none.
• The list of pages at the bottom of the catalog now displays correctly when you select “show all.”
• Subject pages are now displayed with correct links to the global subjects and the global pages have correct display of the subject path.
• I’d like to know if people are still getting the stack overflow errors. I applied a work-around last night but I’m not sure if it is correcting the problem for everyone.

I made some improvements to the Add Books tab. Notably, it now saves the libraries you use on the left, and remembers them between sessions.

We hashed many of the features out on the Google Group. But I’m still considering whether the tag box should be “sticky” or not. Oh, if you’re pining for the old one, use it here.

In a day or two we’ll be adding the most requested feature—adding multiple books at a time.

LibraryThing hearts Longfellow Books in Portland, Maine. Tim’s wife Lisa reads there. Axel, Stewie and Seamus gets dog treats. They even compliment Abby on her book choices. So, in our continuing quest to get more Portland, ME members–to invite for burgers–we’ve given Longfellow a stack of free gift accounts. If you’re local, stop by and pick one up.

Link dump:

• Bookwormz. Find an independent bookstore near you (LT user Cinnamon-Girl).
• Bookstore Tourism. A great idea. We missed Larry’s talk at Book Expo America, but then he became a LibraryThing author!

Richard Wallis over at Talis has put together a Firefox extension called LibraryThingThing. In fact, it should have been called LibraryThingLibraryThing because it fancies up LibraryThing pages with library information, namely the number of libraries that have the book, drawing on the Talis Platform Holdings Lookup Service. If you click on the “Found in X Libraries” link, you get a list of those libraries, with links to their page.

LibraryThingThing is a complex three-API Greasemonkey mashup, querying the Holding Lookup Service along with LibraryThing’s thingISBN and OCLC’s xISBN service. It makes my head spin a bit. Three cheers for Richard. Too bad he works for Talis, or he might have won the Mashing Up the Library Contest.

LibraryThingThing can be found at: http://www.talis.com/tdn/greasemonkey/librarythingthing

This is an exceedingly cool mashup, and a very good demonstration of all the components. To my mind, it would be more useful if it did less, telling you only if the book was in your library. Do you agree? How should LibraryThing tie into libraries. As always, your thoughts are much appreciated.

We were, actually, planning on doing something like this, and even started the code. When we bring something live it will be a lot less technically elegant—good old server-side programming—but also not browser- and extension-dependent.

In other news, Chris just came by to grab the ginormous server box. Abby took a picture of it, but her camera uses some arcane memory stick format, and she forgot the cable is too modern for Tim. We have photographic proof of a new server—really!

Neither Zabby’s Traveling Farm Animals nor this pot-bellied pig endorse LibraryThing.

Tomorrow from 9-1:00 at Cape Elizabeth, Maine’s Thomas Memorial Library there will ice cream, crafts, a tent, face painting, magic lessons, a professional balloon-twister, a “standup chameleon,” and animals from a traveling petting zoo—including this pot-bellied pig—AND if that were not enough, Abby and Tim giving out free LibraryThing accounts!

The Thomas Memorial Library Foundation is sponsoring our table at a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the library rennovation. And free accounts will be available at the circulation desk for the rest of the year. With some luck, we’ll pick up some local members. If you’re a local, but not a Cape Elizabethan, stay tuned; we have some other local-area plans in the works too.

Meanwhile, while we’re with the goats, Chris is busy working on racking and synching the new “monster” server. By Friday we should have three servers online, and four or five by the Friday after that.

Please extend a warm welcome to Christopher Holland, LibraryThing’s newest employee!

To kick things off Chrisopher has given the catalog major facelift and upgrade.You can now edit book information right on the screen, without using the “pencil” icon. Just double-click the cell and an edit box appears where the content was. The new interface also has a search box visible at all times. (I realized we needed then when, to my surprise, the search function turned out to be one of the top-hit pages.) Oh, and a new, soothing color.

Double-click to edit

Edit and save

The new control bar:

LibraryThing will be going down for some well-deserved rest at 12am EST. I expect the downtime to last between 30mins and 1 hour.

The site is slow now – we know, and we’re working on it. We got an influx of users today, thanks to the Wall Street Journal article and a Boing Boing reference. Traffic is ridiculously high (almost 15 times normal) and we’re working on adding servers to compensate. Stay with us while we grow over the next few hours!

TIM UPDATE: Go away! Wait, that’s unfriendly. We love you. If you go away, we’ll love you even more when you come back–we’ll kill the fatted calf!

But seriously, things are calming down a bit, but it’s still running past capacity. Don’t despair. Server upgrades are coming. Unfortunately, I can’t just throw money at the problem. But I’m doing that anyway 🙂

A big feature release is coming soon. Until then, sorry for covering all these press mentions, but they’re starting to snowball, I hope.

The Wall Street Journal’s Online Edition just did a long, sympathetic article on LibraryThing, “Social Networking for Bookworms” by Aaron Rutkoff. It’s public-access for thirty days via that URL.

Not to lick the hand that feeds me, but Rutkoff did an excellent descriptive and analytical job, covering a lot of the site and getting past some of the entertaining canards—”it’s about who has the biggest library!” and “it’s about dating!”—to what’s really going on. The nod to the Long Tail was also nice—just what you’d expect from the WSJ.

I’m also learning to restrain my big mouth, avoid controversy and stay “on message.”* I do want to say, however, that the article plays up tags more than I’d want. In the interview as always I try not to claim too much for them. Yes, I’ll show out where tags can help over formal, professionally-determined classification, but I make of point of noting that tags don’t solve everything and, ideally, they support each other. This is, however, a subtle and not very interesting point. So it tends to get lost and, at least in some eyes, I end up looking like a tag-drunk Web 2.0 twit. That’s at least 1/3 wrong.

Oh, and Abby has a last name! As for the two nameless programmers, their identities will shortly be revealed.

*I did, however, swear unintentionally during the interview. The reporter was nice enough not to quote me or to refer to me as “Tim Spalding, an exceptionally foul-mouthed programmer and bibliophile, hostile to subject tags, librarians and apple pie, who runs a dating site.”

The new issue of Poets & Writers has an article on LibraryThing, Strangers Meet in Virtual Libraries, by C. Max Magee (blog). It’s tackles the social side of LibraryThing nicely, drawing on an interview with Tim and with LT user Grunin. I like this part:

“Bibliophiles are easy to spot at cocktail parties. They are the ones lingering near the host’s bookshelves, their heads cocked at a forty-five-degree angle, scanning the collection of books and comparing it to their own.”

I know many LT users are also authors, so I’ll mention that the issue also includes the article The Writer’s Web Site, by Sue Bowness, advising writers on how to get a web site. It’s a good, basic introduction to some of the issues, but—speaking as an ex-SEO guru—the advice about Search Engine Optimization is off-base.

PS: This is Tim, reworking a post of Abby’s as she works on the tshirt issue.

UPDATE: 2:30pm. It’s back up again, albeit a little slow as it builds up a “cache.” No data was lost.

The main server went down last night around 5am. The situation is NOT serious. The slave server never went down, so there should be zero data loss. I also have backups of all the critical data from a few hours before the crash.

I’m waiting to do the restore because turning the slave into the master is something I’ve never done. LibraryThing’s database admin is going to do it, and he’s in California, dreaming untroubled dreams. I’ll wake him up in a half-hour or so.

We interrupt this features blog just as Abby and I were interrupted today—by an enormous moose. No kidding.

If you don’t know already, LibraryThing is located in Maine. But we’re on the East End of Portland, the most densely populated part of the state. I for one don’t ski, hike, kayak, snowshoe or climb mountains. Until now, my “Maine experience” has been limited to crab rolls and one day of blueberry picking. Abby, a resident of downtown Boston, is even less a Mainer, and since she works 16-hour days, she’s seen almost nothing of the state.

It went down like this. In the morning, Abby and I heard queer trumpeting noises; my money was on truck brakes. When my wife went out there were cop cars at both ends of our street and a crowd of cops and media about a block away. When I tried to investigate the commotion, I was sternly ordered to get back inside. I assumed a grisly accident or maybe a criminal, locked in his house and holding the police at bay with a gun. Ten minutes later I saw a cruiser moving slowly down the street, and went over to the window with Abby.

And there, across the street, in the neighbor’s driveway, was a huge bull moose.

Our spirits went up and down over the next hour or so. The moose was lying down, and we noticed something was wrong with its head. We figured out he had broken an antler. But he was alive, and although Maine game wardens appeared with an enormous–and not visibly pneumatic–gun, they just shot a dart into it. Alas, it turns out the dart was loaded with a fatal dose of tranquilizer, so over the next hour we watched the moose die. The game wardens were dignified about it, and the death wasn’t violent, but it was still terrible to watch. It was a magnficent creature. When a crane loaded his body onto a truck, his body was all splayed out. He was huge.

Once the moose was almost dead, we found out what happened (with video). It turns out it had made its way into the city and, together with another moose, put on an early morning show near Back Cove. Then, going up Munjoy Hill, it was hit by a tow-truck. According to the police it was “badly injured,” although I remain unconvinced. News footage shows a broken antler, but it looked like it was moving just fine. According to a local informant most moose who wander into the city end up getting put down one way or the other. Besides the danger to cars, moose not infrequently trample people, particularly those who think they’re safe to approach. Moose aren’t endangered or anything.

So that’s the LibraryThing moose story. Tomorrow Tim and Abby will be eaten by lobsters.

The Book Guys, Allan Stypeck and Mike Cuthbert, interviewed me about LibraryThing for their most recent radio show, airing around the country, mostly this weekend.

Here’s a station list, with times. Or you can just go to their web site. A Real Audio version is already posted on their shows list.

The show’s headliner is the USPS’s Gary Thuro, discussing Post Office publishing ventures. I am ushered in about 6/10 of the way through.

If you found the site because of The Book Guys, hello! Leave a note. I’m sure the “regulars” will be glad to welcome you too.

LibraryThing is currently weighed toward librarians and bloggers—eg., MARC records and RSS feeds. The “collecting” community—the Book Guy’s core audience—isn’t as well served. I’d be interested what we could do better there. A “condition” field?

So you might not make it to Italy this summer – that’s ok, you can take a tour of LibraryThing instead! We knew a simple intro to LibraryThing was something we were severely lacking, and inspired by the cool last.fm tour (where apparently, “what you get when you sign up” includes… a pony!) we made our own.

We have no ponies. But we’re proud of it anyway.

Over on LibraryThing’s Thingology blog, I blog the unveiling of thingISBN, LibraryThing’s first API. thingISBN is LibraryThing’s “answer” to OCLC‘s xISBN—give it an ISBN and it will give you ISBNs to other editions of the work. Where xISBN uses FRBR, LibraryThing uses the “everyone is a librarian” works system. thingISBN isn’t going to replace xISBN, which is an extraordinary service, but it can supplement it in interesting ways. For starters, it knows a lot of paperbacks xISBN doesn’t.

This is red meat for mashups and of interest to catalogers and library systems programmers. But most “regular” LibraryThing users won’t care much, so I won’t drone on about it here.