TechCruch breaks the news: Reddit has been acquired by Condé Nast. Reddit is a community-driven news and what’s-cool site—something like Digg, but better. (For starters, Reddit hasn’t hyped up an untrue story about one of LibraryThing’s competitors!) I’ve followed them for some time, ever since meeting the founders at a Paul Graham/Y Combinator event in Cambridge. I’m pleased good things happen to good people.*

UPDATE: See this blog post. They’re still rich, but it appears they’re going to be tortured with office nonsense until their get-out-of-jail date.

Apparently Reddit had a prior relationship with Conde Nast, making Lipstick.com, Reddit for celebrity news. It doesn’t have a lot of users yet, so I’m thinking a few hundred Thingamabrarians could get together and vote up our celebrity story—appearing in OK Magazine on the same page as Lindsay Lohan. Ready? Set? Go!

*I’m also impressed by their blog entry on the role of users in Reddit’s success (“we’re not kidding ourselves: you all have made it everything that it is”). Much more gracious than YouTube, IMHO.

The Librarians who LibraryThing group now has 1,000 members. I ask you, can 1,000 librarians be wrong?

Not to bring up an example, but an alert LibraryThinger wrote us about some rumors circulating about LibraryThing, and given out at one of the many recent library conferences. Here are the rumors, and the truth behind them:

1. LibraryThing was started by Simmons graduate students. False. LibraryThing was started by me, Tim Spalding, and I don’t have an MLS. Some months later, Abby, who has an MLS from Simmons, joined as LibraryThing’s first employee.*
2. LibraryThing is staffed purely by librarians. False. Of three employees (me, Abby and Chris), Abby is the only librarian.
3. LibraryThing gets its MARC records from OCLC. False. LibraryThing has expressed interest in working with OCLC, but we do not currently do so. LibraryThing gets its records directly from libraries’ who make their records available through Z39.50 connections. We connect to about 60 libraries and library consortia. The most commonly used of these is the Library of Congress.
4. Abby and Tim know all the words to Hips Don’t Lie. No comment.

*The second employee was supposed to be a Simmons grad, but it fell through. We’ve found it very hard to hire library tech people. The best ones may not be paid what they’re worth, but convincing someone to leave a secure, 40-hour, sometimes unionized job at a library for a small startup that won’t pay you more, but where you are expected to work 80 hours per week, with no promise your job will be around in a year… well, it’s hard.

Tim and I were at Tufts a couple of weeks ago for NEASIS&T’s “The Dawn of the Embedded Library” program – he was gave a talk, and I was on a panel with all the speakers at the end. It was a lot of fun, we got to hear from Annette Bailey and Godmar Back, creators of the LibX extension for Firefox (she created it for a job interview – how incredible is that?). Nicole Hennig was impressive – she’s doing all sorts of crazy things at MIT, trying out all sort of new tools, using bits and pieces and mash-ups, and putting themselves “where the users are.” The whole day was recorded, and the talks are all online at NEASIS&T’s blog. Thanks to Caryn Anderson for pulling the whole thing together!

The speaking tour has just begun – next week Tim’s off to talk to the Delaware Valley chapter of the ACRL about the future of the catalog, and I’ll be with the Wisconsin librarians at a water park. I mean, a conference. Then in November I’ll be part of “OPAC 2.0: Reinventing the Library Catalog” for NELINET. Any Thingamabrarians going to be at any of these? We really should start having meet-ups or something. The BBQ in Maine over the summer was fun.

In other belated news, LT made it into October’s issue of School Library Journal. In the article, “A Book Lover’s MySpace“, Kathy Ishizuka calls it “one of the Net’s sleeper hits, a testament to both the word-of-mouth power of the blogosphere and the enduring passion for books.” Not bad! Plus, if you can get ahold of the print copy, you get to see a photo of my shining face. She also includes a link to a podcast with John Klima, who’s using LT to recommend books to the teens in his library.

From Bruce Sterling’s Wired blog post, Overheard at IDEA2006:

“They’re able to do things I’ve never seen any library do. LibraryThing moves at the speed of light.”

Well, whoever said that—even if you didn’t mean it—you made our week!

UPDATE: Aha! We found it. It’s from a talk Ed Vielmetti (Superpatron) gave at IDEA2006. The full quote is:

“LibraryThing moves at the speed of light compared to library vendors … [They’re] able to do things that I haven’t seen any library do.”

Also nice:

“Most library catalogs are not fun to browse through—you can sort of struggle to find what you want. I can spend hours on LibraryThing and come up with a huge list of ‘Oh, I wish I’d read that,’ ‘Do I have that book or do I need to check it out from the library?’ .. There’s a big opportunity for systemmatic change within libraries, to incorporate some of [these] ideas.”

Wow, and the admiration flows both ways. Wouldn’t it be great if every library in the country had someone like Vielmetti?—an unpaid, expert, passionate patron helping to move the library’s technology along. It’s almost unfair he’s in Ann Arbor. Without him they’d still be one of the most technologically vibrant libraries in the country. When the Revolution comes, comrades Vielmetti and Blyberg will be redistributed!

Have you seen MsDewey.com? It’s an odd, somewhat diverting “search engine,” with terrible results, but featuring a funny—and hot, albeit scary-hot—actress who flirts with you, insults you and generally hams it up to the questions you give her. Play around, but ones like “Kiss me!,” “How old are you?” and anything mentioning Bush have specific responses. The calculator to the right came out in order to insult my manhood!

Anyway, I’ll eat my socks if this thing doesn’t go down in a jiffy. Dewey is a registered trademark of OCLC, and trademarks—unlike patents and copyrights—must be actively defended if they are to remain valid. If OCLC doesn’t act, the Dewey Decimal System* could end up like the “elevator” trademark. Notably, OCLC sued the Library Hotel (OCLC Press Release), for daring to decorate and number its rooms by Dewey, citing the need for trademarks to be “vigorously defended.” After a public-relations debacle—OCLC sued them for three-times profits!—the parties settled.**

From a WhoIs search it appears the site as put together by San Francisco-based EVB. Searching some more, I discover that Microsoft has confessed to sponsoring the site, writing:

“Who says search can’t be fun? At Windows Live we are constantly exploring new and creative ways to promote our search offering and deliver relevant information in an interesting and engaging way. The Ms. Dewey website is just one example of these efforts.”

I’m AMAZED Microsoft would make a legal blunder like this. And if OCLC approved it, there’d be a ® symbol somewhere, don’t you think?

*I object on principle to the trademark, and to the IP issues generally. Melvil Dewey died in 1931. The core of the system long since passed into the public domain everywhere. You want more bitching? See here.
**Their press release quotes the hotel as saying:

“We do not believe that our use of the Dewey® trademarks in our beautiful boutique hotel near the New York Public Library infringes OCLC’s Dewey® trademarks. … But acknowledging OCLC’s Dewey® trademarks and making a charitable contribution to promote reading by children, rather than spending money litigating, seems to be a reasonable way to resolve this matter.”

Considering that everyone says that you only need to use the ® symbol once, having them use it three times in a row looks a tad forced.