Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Friday, July 7th, 2006

Friendster wins social networking patent

Check out this story from Red Herring. Friendster, the ailing granddaddy of social networks, has won a patent for online social networking.

LibraryThing’s not in trouble. The patent is about social networking, particularly systems that limit you according to degrees of social separation, not shared book tastes. Still, it’s a pretty obnoxious award. What’s next, patenting one-click shopping? Oh. Never mind.

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Wednesday, June 7th, 2006

The Long Tail

There’s an article in today’s New York Times, “What Netflix Could Teach Hollywood“, that’s essentially about the long tail of movies.* David Leonhardt writes about The Conversation, a Francis Ford Coppola movie from the 1970s, that,

“… was on its way to the movie graveyard just a few years ago. Since video stores have room for only a few thousands titles, some didn’t carry it, and it was slowly being buried under the ever growing pile of newer films at other stores. It would have been easy a decade ago to imagine a time when few people would ever watch “The Conversation” again.

Then came Netflix. The Internet company with the red envelopes stocks just about all of the 60,000 movies, television shows and how-to videos that are available on DVD (and that aren’t pornography). …

The result is a vast movie meritocracy that gives a film a second or third life simply because—get this—it’s good.”

The long tail is about going deeper than just the latest Hollywood summer blockbusters. Netflix demonstrates that people will, in fact, rent a movie that isn’t prominently displayed at their local video store (what local video store could stock as many DVDs as Netflix?), and that came out as long ago as—gasp—1974.

Similarly, people aren’t just reading the recent best sellers. Go deeper into the list, and you see that there are actually a lot of people who are reading the seemingly “less popular” books.

Yes, the top books on LibraryThing are the six Harry Potter books, followed by The Da Vinci Code. But look beyond the top 10. What about number 150? Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin has 621 members. A whopping 358 members have Tender is the Night (clocking in at number 392). Go farther down the list. Even number 1,000, The Stars My Destination, has over 200 members.

Conversely, check out the “you and no other” on your fun statistics page. The amount of seemingly obscure books that other people have in their catalogs is mind blowing sometimes. Someone else actually has Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism? And I don’t know them?**

A lot of people on LibraryThing pride themselves on the obscurity of their library. Tastes are broad, and, as it turns out, when we can reach beyond the popular, more recent stuff, we do. So Hollywood blockbusters and NYT bestsellers aside, maybe the mainstream isn’t so mainstream after all.

* The Long Tail was coined by Chris Anderson, whom, incidentally, Tim and I saw give a talk at BookExpo America a few weeks ago. (We also scored advance copies of his book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, which is coming out later this year).
**I should. They have a great library. Hi aiross!

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Monday, June 5th, 2006

Library Mashup Competition

The library vendor Talis just announced a library mashup competition.

It’s a pretty wide-open thing. You can use any source you want–Google, Amazon, OCLC, Z39.50*–and do anything you want, so long as it’s nifty. You don’t even need to work in a library (although the necessity of saying this is troubling!). About the only hard rule, is that you need to release it under some sort of copyleft license**. The winner gets £1,000, the runner-up £500. The contest ends August 18.

Best of all, I’m going to be one of the judges. This has a down side—I can’t enter myself. But it will be very fun. The other judges are a pretty august group.

Although I can’t enter it, I WILL do some mashups. More importantly, I’m going to start releasing APIs that others can use to build their mashups. As many of you know, I’m constrained by the Amazon API. Offering an API to the full LibraryThing data set would inevitably involve releasing Amazon API data. So I’m going to have to stick to ISBNs, LibraryThing codes (like the “work” number) and user-generated data, like tags and such. That shouldn’t be a problem, since user data is what LibraryThing is all about.

Talis has set up a discussion area for the contest itself, another for ideas and another for entries. But feel free to talk over here too, particularly as regards what data would be fun to extract from LibraryThing.

*I pushed for them to include that in the suggested materials list. Z39.50 is a TREMENDOUS resource, almost completely ignored because it’s a little wiggly to work with.
**The small print says “winning entrants will need to satisfy the judges as to the spirit and rationale behind their licensing decisions, prior to prize money being made available.” As someone who recently signed a financing deal, I’m getting very wary of small print***. I can tell you that I’m going to push hard to allow any copyleft license to apply.
***Abe managed to slip in an “Andorra” clause, a yearly tribute of wine, four hams and forty loaves of bread. That’s okay, my employment agreement mandates a water cooler filled with Guiness, in invisible ink on the back.

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Sunday, June 4th, 2006

WineThing?

No, I didn’t build “WineThing.” I did think about it once, shortly after LibraryThing was born. I figured I’d stick to books.*

But somebody did it, and did it rather well. The site is Cork’d (corkd.com). I was originally going to blog about WineLog, which also looks good, but I think Cork’d does it slightly better; it’s certainly more elegant (than LibraryThing too). From the Alexa numbers Cork’d and Winelog look locked in battle; it’s unclear who will hit the all important social-software “critical mass.”** There’s also a site called CellarTracker, which appears to hide a lot of functionality beheath the interface of a circa-1999 second-tier ecommerce site.

Cork’d doesn’t do very much yet***, but it does what it does well, and easily. I’m hoping that, as they gain users, they discover the same data richness LibraryThing did. Right now, Cork’d only has manual, user-to-user recommendations. Since I have no friends on the site, I’ll never get any. (Although can follow what I’m drinking via RSS!) I’m sure, when the data gets rich enough, they’ll be able to generate good algorithmic ones as well.

BUT, wouldn’t it be fun if you could link your LibraryThing and Cork’d accounts? Some very simple linking, and we could have “People who read The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman drink.. Gewürtztraminer!”

Sign up, and tell ’em you came from LibraryThing…

*Incidentally, dozens of people have told me they thought of LibraryThing too. The work is in the doing.
**It’s strange they launched so close together. The same happened with LibraryThing and Reader2. Reader2 actually won, briefly, so while the social-software piling effect is important, functionality can trump it.
***Why can’t I upload the label? Wineries would fill it with content in days.

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Thursday, June 1st, 2006

Intaglectuals 1: Kevin Kelly

I’ve been meaning to write up my thoughts on what I heard at Book Expo America or listened to recently online—Kevin Kelly, Chris Anderson, David Weinberger and (maybe) Carly Fiorina. This started out as one big compare-and-contrast blob. I’d better split it up.

Kevin Kelly: What Will Happen to Books? As many of you know, Abby and I recently attended Book Expo America, promoting LibraryThing with Abebooks. BEA is a very “miscellaneous” affair—embracing everyone from authors to printers, agents to librarians.

If there was a unifying meme it was the need to react to Kevin Kelly’s just-published “manifesto” “What will happen to books?” (New York Times Magazine, May 14). The general feeling was “This guy’s a nut,” with an undertone of anxiety—What if he’s NOT a nut? What if I just don’t “get” it? What if I’m a dinosaur?

I generally find myself on the “left” of these issues. I think things have happened or are happening now—the web, Google, blogs, open source, book scanning, wikis, tagging, mashups—with ramifications for intellectual life in general and book publishing in particular. I even think—don’t laugh—LibraryThing has a tiny part to play in these changes.

So it’s odd to find someone to the left of me. That Kevin Kelly guy’s a nut! The article fairly bristles with overreaching, but I’ll single out a quote that makes me embarrassed for LibraryThing:

“The link and the tag may be two of the most important inventions of the last 50 years.”

The link, okay—particularly if link is metonymous with the internet in general—but the TAG?!

It’s too early to tell, but I’d be hesitant to add even something broader, like “user generated data (and metadata)” to the top 100 inventions of the last half-century. I mean, what do you bump? Genetic engineering? The Pill? The satellite? The one-click patent?

Am I a dinosaur?

*Of course, although books and tags were central to his the article, he didn’t mention LibraryThing. That’s life.

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Sunday, May 14th, 2006

Tagging meets Subject Headings

Tim has just announced a new LibraryThing feature – the addition of subjects. Now you can look at a book and see both the user-created tags as well as the librarian-assigned subject headings. This puts us in the middle of the age old debate: tags or subject headings? Folksonomies or taxonomies? Ok, maybe the question isn’t quite that old, but it’s certainly debated. Subject analysis is a fuzzy discipline – decisions on “aboutness” are hard. But is it necessarily a question of one over the other? Can they work together at all?

Tags are touted as one of the new great things coming out of Web 2.0. People organize their information using their own vocabulary, deciding for themselves what their books are “about”, and what words they will use to classify them. Tags can also be incoherent, unsystematic, and haphazard. Some tags, like fiction or unread are more useful to the user who provided the tag then to other people. (The unreadable tag which I just discovered, on the other hand, is fascinating!)

There are certainly cases where tags work well. Take Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, for example. The top tags include queer and gay fiction, whereas the subject headings are City and town life > Fiction, Humorous stories and San Francisco (Calif.) > Fiction. Someone looking for Tales of the City is unlikely to start their search under City and town life > Fiction (San Francisco, however, might prove a good access point, which is also highlighted in the tags).*

Subject headings, on the other hand, use controlled vocabularies to show hierarchical relationships. They’re assigned by professionals, and are vast, structured, consistent, and organize books into conceptual categories.

Subject headings work great for browsing a subject area, because of their hierarchical structure. Under the tag for civil war is a haphazard collection of books. The subject page for United States > History > Civil War, 1861-1865, on the other hand, provides a list of subdivisions, giving you the ability to do more educated browsing. Interested in the fiction? Historiography? Women in the Civil War?

There are far more subject headings than tags, and their use is indeed a balance of precision. When LCSH terms are too specific, they will pull up only a few books (conversely, if they are too general, thousands appear). Check out the subject heading Married People > Drama which brings up four books in LibraryThing, including two Shakespeare works – but strangely, not Macbeth.

The ordered structure of subject headings gives added meaning. History > Philosophy is very different from Philosophy > History – a distinction that isn’t necessarily apparent when searching history or philosophy separately as tags.

Another example – if we look at the tag dystopia, the top two books are 1984 and Brave New World. Interestingly enough, the subject Dystopias gives the exact same top two books. This is also a good demonstration of the binary nature of subjects—something either does or does not belong to a subject. According to the LC, The Time Machine is a dystopia. By contrast, a tag can essentially say The Time Machine is “sort of” a dystopia.

And still, there are times where tags and subjects appear to be enmeshed. Check out Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim Two Boys – the tags and subject headings are pretty complimentary.

This comparing and contrasting is getting addictive, but I’ll stop. The data’s there – go try it yourself!

*[We owe the idea of looking at “gay” and “queer” tags to Clay Shirky‘s seminal talk/essay “Ontology is Overrated.” The phrasing of a low tag score saying something is “sort of” something is David Weinberger adapting Joshua Schachter (source). — Tim]

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Sunday, May 14th, 2006

Welcome to Thing-ology

That’s right, LibraryThing is now a two-blog town. The main LibraryThing blog will continue to focus on features and announcements and exciting new things like that, and over here we’ll get to go deeper into some of the bigger and more theoretical issues that LibraryThing raises.

So. This is the place where we’ll talk about the meanings, methods, and debate around LibraryThing and its features. I expect there to be discussion of Web 2.0, Library 2.0, social software, FRBR and LT’s “works” system, folksonomies and taxonomies, and much much more. Information Science! Philosophy! Controversy! To the library world and beyond, people!

To get started, I’m putting together a blogroll and looking for suggestions. Who else should I be following?

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