No, that’s not a real idea, that’s an idea from Dave Pattern’s hilarious spoof The Library 2.0 Idea Generator, better and funnier than the original Web 2.0 Idea Generator.

Some examples:
revitalize the Netflix model using the Netflix model
unclassify the perpetual beta and mash-it-up with Google Maps
discard your staff using a wiki
podcast about Lorcan Dempsey and use him to replace the OPAC
analyze faceted browsing just to annoy Michael Gorman
disrupt microformats and use them to replace all of your librarians

And related to LibraryThing:
completely reinvent LibraryThing by harnessing the ”Long Tail”
deconstruct LibraryThing and become a billionaire
visualize Lorcan Dempsey using LibraryThing
hack OCLC using LibraryThing

It’s all very funny, but it actually generated my secret “next big idea.” (No, it’s not “completely reinvent the biblioblogosphere and then paint it purple.”)

Hat tip: Panlibus.

I just finished listening to the latest Talis Library 2.0 Gang podcast (on headphones though, so Tim wouldn’t wince at the sound of his own voice), this week on tagging and folksonomies. I’m struck by one thing that Casey Bisson mentions. He relates a story of a patron asking if they can put all the books he’s interested in, and just those, on one shelf–the answer of course, is to laugh, of course the library won’t be rearranged just for that one person!

In a virtual library, however, you can pull all the books you’re interested in, and just those books.

In a library, each book has a call number, which places it on the shelf somewhere, next to the other books that have similar “aboutness.” I might start looking for At home in the studio: the professionalization of women artists in America in the history section, because I know the author is a historian–but I wouldn’t find it there, because the Library of Congress Call Number is an N (Fine Arts).

The answer to the patron at Casey’s library, is that it doesn’t matter where the books are physically located in the library – as long as he can pull them together intellectually.

For the purposes of shelving, in a library, At home in the studio is “about” fine arts – it can only be on one shelf, after all.

If that book was in my LT catalog though (and it is), it can be “about” multiple things–there doesn’t have to be one essential place that it lives. I could tag it (and I have) so I could find it when I was searching for my history books, and when I wanted my art books. It can be on both “shelves”, on any shelf – because there is no shelf (oh, postmodernism)…

Ok. Enough rehashing. Go bend spoons with your mind.

(We’re going to get back to serious intellectual thoughts soon, we promise.)

Advertising Age blog (Bob Garfield):

“Coolness, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. Exactly one blogger, a college student named Suze Bramlet, used “coolest thing ever” in the same thought with “Birkenstocks.” Nobody in the blog universe did so with Carrot Top. But the pool of cool is predictably deep: Librarything.com, Google Earth, Google Ride Finder, BenGay, Pandora; the Diet Coke and Mentos video; tennis and the fact that nurse sharks have two uteri but no placenta.”

Let’s dig deeper. I decided to take advantage of my old school friend Kevin Shay‘s Google API Proximity Search (GAPS)*, asking for the number of pages that include “cool” and the terms below within three words of each other.

Google Earth – 134,100
Pandora – 65,730
Mentos – 15,632
LibraryThing – 390
Birkenstocks – 271
Nurse sharks – 114
Google Ride Finder – 76
BenGay – 24

Kevin is the author of the humor piece “Pirate Riddles for Sophisticates” (McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, 6/14/00):

Q: Of which concept shared by Jungian psychology and Northrop Frye’s literary theory are pirates especially fond?
A: ARRRchetype.