Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Thursday, July 12th, 2007

I love Clay Shirky

Now the truth can be told. I love Clay Shirky.

First, Shirky gave the talk Ontology is Overrated which, despite some quibbles, was the intellectual justification of LibraryThing. At least until David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous came along.

Now comes Shirky on love, at Supernova 2007:
http://conversationhub.com/2007/07/10/video-clay-shirky-on-love-internet-style/

In a way, it’s another sort of justification. LibraryThing is about love too. It’s not just the love on the buzz page. Nor the cookies and candy we get in the mail.* It’s the members, loving books and loving each other.**

Like the Ise shrine***, LibraryThing is also rebuilt every night. It’s not the software–although that can assist and focus things. It’s the social. As a lover says: Without you, we’d be nothing!

We just finished a round of social changes, designed to make LibraryThing more social—the so-called Project Ocelot. This week we’vee also been hard at work on putting LibraryThing on Facebook.

In all this, we are determined not to lose our core strength–book data. Features like our new Connection News aren’t about members in a vacuum, but how members are interacting with their books. And some of the most interesting book data is social book data. It is, for example, amazing but not surprising that our works-combination system—driven by users—is on a par with the mammoth OCLC’s xISBN service. xISBN is a very clever algorithm, but love is the ultimate algorithm.

In the next week or so there’s is going to see a major announcement about social book data—one that LibraryThing has long knew about, but which was driven by a far larger, cooler entity. It should terrify the big players. We plan to embrace it, lovingly.


*Recently it was Australian Tim Tams.
**That’s also why our central rules is against making personal attacks.
***For a great discussion of the Ise shrine, and other “impermanent permanents” see Alexander Stille‘s The Future of the Past. Great book.

PS: If anyone knows Shirky, tell him to give me a ring so I can send some Tim Tams his way. I’ve been sending him love letters for two years. I even hired one of his students. No response. Clay, where’s the love?

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Thursday, July 12th, 2007

Fauxonomy

From a rival site’s page on Lusy Lady a book about a Seattle peepshow.

Pretty impressive tag cloud! I guess lots of people have tagged it “female author.” This must be the important thing here.

Wait, how many of their users have the book? One.

Folksonomy, meet fauxonomy. As Jamais Cascio (via David Weinberger) puts it, fauxonomy is:

“metadata added with the conscious intent to confuse or obfuscate,” or to weight them for spammish reasons.

LibraryThing has 47 members with the book. And 53 tags. With numbers:

The moral: When you have a lot of data you can know what a book is about—note how big “erotica” and “photography” are. When you don’t, pretending doesn’t help.

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Sunday, July 8th, 2007

I get my kicks above the waistline, sunshine

Thailand’s Bangkok Post reports that social networking, including LibraryThing, is “almost better than sex.” So many jokes to pick from!

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Monday, July 2nd, 2007

My Amazon recommendations

Tim and I trade computers, and this is the email I get…


Your recommendations are crazy now

Abby,

If you sign into Amazon you will notice the recommendations have gone crazy—90% crotch-less panties and othersuch. This happened as follows:

I showed Altay the bananas in Amazon
The bananas link to other food, including the skinned whole rabbit (yes, really)
The rabbit links to a large number of erotic panties (the rabbit was Dugg and people went crazy)
I clicked a few.
They link to tanks, among other things and light sabers.

Anyway, I signed into Amazon and discovered that Amazon thinks I’m—correction: you, since this is your computer and you are auto-signed in—are all about Hen-party-style clothing.

So, browse German philosophy for a day or two before showing Amazon off at an academic conference.

Tim

Because a picture is worth a thousand tanks and skinned rabbits (so they say):

Now, in addition to the panties, my Amazon recommendations logically include a book called Knitting with Dog Hair*, and an Inflatable Party Sheep. I blame the rabbit, Tim, not you.

*Knitting with Dog Hair on LibraryThing suggests Knits for Barbie doll, but nothing inflatable…

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Sunday, July 1st, 2007

Tim’s notes on ALA 2007

I never finished my big sum-up of the American Library Association annual conference, so I thought I’d turn it into a “notes on ALA” post.

I had HUGE fun at the BIGWIG Social Software Showcase, an informal, underground “unconference” for “Lib2.0” folks to present short presentations. I gave a short one on LibraryThing for Libraries. Michael Porter of WebJunction/OCLC, who did a great presentation on the Facebook API, and I got into a boistrous debate on LibraryThing, librarians and non-librarians, commercial vs. non-commercial entites and OCLC’s closed data policies. Here, David Free, Michael Habib and Kevin Clair look on as I try to intimidate Michael with my extra-large hands (photo by rachelvacek). But we ended up friendly. And, since then, whenever I mention his name, the person I’m talking to blurts out “Oh, he’s a nice guy!” Anyway, it’s clear that if OCLC is the Death Star, he’s a civilian contractor.

Talk. I did a RUSA MARS talk on tags, libraries and social networking. I posted my introduction last week. My favorite quote was this one from Hidden Peanuts:

“Tim Spalding’s presentation was jaw dropping. I’ve played with LibraryThing before, but only a little bit. I had no idea of how deep its current functionality goes.”

But in twenty minutes I didn’t get to be clear about where subjects work and where tags work. Mostly I just did examples where they worked. I think that was a factor in this post.

“On the negative side, I overheard some people chatting as I was waiting in line in the rest room the they were unhappy with Tim’s criticism of Library of Congress Subject Headings.”

Mini photo gallery. Jason Griffey opening the BIGWIG thing. Tim falling off the surfboard meant to demonstrate ALA Anaheim. Abby enjoying cheese fondue. (Cafe La Rouche, a favorite haunt when I was in Georgetown, has great cheese fondue!) Cell phones take bad pictures, so they’re not clickable.

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Friday, June 29th, 2007

Find LibraryThing an employee, get $1,000 worth of books.

See the main blog post.

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Thursday, June 28th, 2007

Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo

TED talk: Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo. Photos from Flickr become a 3-D space. Gadzooks! (hat-tip Talis)

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Saturday, June 23rd, 2007

ALA 2007: Tim and Abby’s Excellent Adventure

If you’re in Washington, DC going to the American Library Association conference, Abby and I hope to see you around. We don’t have a booth, but I’m on panels today and tomorrow:

*BIGWIG Social Software Showcase, 1:30-2:30 Saturday
*RUSA MARS: Harnessing the Hive: Social Networks in Libraries (10:30-12:00 Sunday), with Meredith Farkas and Matthew Bejune

And Abby and I are wandering the hall in our LibraryThing t-shirts (Tim: black; Abby: yellow), meeting people, crashing happy hours, etc.

Update: Come to “Participatory Networks: Libraries as Conversation” 10:30-12:00 (WCC Room 143B) today (Saturday). It’s almost blank in the program, but it’s a top and extremely interesting guy at Second Life—memo to self: put cards in wallet, not pants pocket.

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Thursday, June 7th, 2007

Cutest library catalog

Surely the cutest library catalog ever: http://yakpac.liblime.com/ (hat-tip Kate).

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Wednesday, May 30th, 2007

1pm Abby talking at BEA / NYC Meetup

If you’re at BEA this week—and what book-industry type is not?*—come check out Abby, LibraryThing’s first hire and Head Librarian give a short talk on Thursday at 1pm.

Also, she’s organizing a get-together in NY. Friday night at 6:30, anyone and everyone—BEAers or not—is invited to meet up at The Half King Bar & Restaurant (505 W 23rd Street).**

Abby’s speaking alongside representatives from HarperCollins, Grand Central Publishing, MySpace and Gather. The topic is “Using Social Networking to Build Author Brands.”

She’s going to outline what LibraryThing is all about, and how authors and publishers are using it. But LibraryThing is something different—more? less?—than “social networking” and “author brands” is one of those bloodless, push-push, container-shipping phrases that obscure what’s really going on. Readers don’t connect with “author brands” anymore than passionate lovers connect with “lover brands.” Social networking–or social cataloging–is about real connections. Brands are to real connections what television is to telephone.

Anyway, quibble aside, I’m sure it’ll be a great panel.

*That would be me. I’m on a 1×3-mile island off of Ireland. Really.
**The Half King is apparently a very literary place—they have readings every Monday night, and it’s co-owned by Sebastian Junger. If his place is full of LibraryThing-ers, surely he’ll become a LibraryThing author.

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