Christmas presents from the Mainstream Media! PCWorld’s February issue (on the web, if not the newsstands) has a feature article Scott Spanbauer “New, Improved Web,” on “Web 2.0” applications. The “Collaboration & Community” section covers companies like Flickr, Del.icio.us, Facebook—and LibraryThing!

“For book lovers, it’s a LibraryThing: This site is similar to Del.icio.us, but for the tweed set. If you love books, and love people who love books, LibraryThing is for you. Start by using the service to catalog your book collection: Tag your books by topic, share your catalog with others, and then endlessly browse the titles that they have on their shelves. The utterly book obsessed can add the LibraryThing widget to a blog to show visitors what they have been reading lately. Listing up to 200 books is free; listing any number of books beyond that costs either $10 per year or a one-time $25 fee.”

Except for the part about the “tweed set”—are readers as marginal as that?—that’s pretty sweet.

In related news, LibraryThing has been picked up by a third Welsh-language blog (see the buzz page). It makes more sense than you might think; the National Library of Wales is one of the 30+ libraries LibraryThing accesses. And the Welsh are big readers—Hay-on-Wye, the world’s greatest bookstore-town is located there. And they probably wear tweed a lot too.

(Hat tip to Steve Cohen’s LibraryStuff for the link.)

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