Fellow Portland Mainer John McGrath, of Squirl, hacked together Wordie, social cataloging and social networking for words. Basically, you “catalog” words and arrange them in lists (eg., my products named after their place of origin). If two users share a word, that connects them. It’s a deeply silly idea, but I love that he did it.
PS: Wordie is now included among LibraryThing’s “also on” list, available from your profile.
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Lyrics here. (From the Laughing Librarian, who also created Zen Librarian Koans; hat-tip Jessamyn.)
By contrast, an enthusiastic Thingamabrarian sent me this photo of her new tattoo:
Okay, I faked that. (Hat-tip Steve Cohen.)
UPDATE: Comment on this post pointed out the homepage pic of the University of Wales, Newport. Gah!
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I hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving as much as we did. With all the tryptophan in our systems, we didn’t make any major progress over the holiday. But we chipped away at some lesser features and bugs, in between courses:
Groups now sport RSS feeds for recent messages. We plan to add feeds for your groups, your posts, etc.Labels: 1
Today we launched simple integration with Shaman Drum Bookshop of Ann Arbor, MI. Basically, users can put themselves down as customers and get availability and pricing information on work pages (see right). There’s are no strings or costs to the program; we’re just trying to give give people a better service.
To integrate you need to have an inventory system that can write a file to the web. To make it work, we need a simple XML feed. For performance reasons we can’t be querying an API book-by-book.
The format of the feed is very simple. Here’s an example:
<isbnlist>
<isbn count="1" price="29.95">3598710364</isbn>
<isbn count="2" price="19.95">351911304x</isbn>
<isbn count="1" price="69.50">3519112892</isbn>
<isbn count="4" price="69.50">3519112906</isbn>
<isbn count="1" price="59.50">3519112884</isbn>
...
</isbnlist>
We are open to modificatons (eg., if you can post availability, but not prices). In addition to the feed, we’ll need to have URLs to link to the book pages, and a URL for searching. We willl grab the file between midnight and 2am every night.
LibraryThing isn’t going to double your sales—you’ve probably already have the loyalty of the Thingamabrarians—but it’s a nice service to give your customers.
In the near future, I’ll be producing some stats for bookstores, like holdings patterns against work popularity, that might be interesting or useful to them.
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LibraryThing now integrates with Shaman Drum, the legendary independent bookshop in Ann Arbor, MI. Edit your profile, check a checkbox (down at the bottom) and your work page will sport availability and pricing information from Shaman Drum and a link to their site.
Right now, it’s just Shaman Drum. But the program is open to any bookstore. So long as you have a decent inventory system, it should be a snap. We’ve published participation details on our other blog. I’m going to approach a few, but feel free to let your local bookstore know about it.
If you’ve spent time in Ann Arbor, you know that Shaman Drum is the best bookstore in town, and one of the best independents in the country. It doesn’t exactly lack for competition, with the flagship Borders store across the street and the Dawn Treader one street farther. I went to grad school in Ann Arbor, and Shaman Drum was practically a second home. I’m so glad the fine folks who run the place were receptive to my idea.
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