Happy New Year to all!

I’m back from a week of vacation. My apologies for recent feature-and-bug turgidity. Abby, Chris and I are tanned, rested and ready.*

December was a banner month. PC Magazine named us one of the web’s top five web services.** Members added over 1,175,000 books—the most ever! We also recorded our highest number of paid memberships, even excluding gift memberships, which were very sought after in the days before Christmas. And we sent out a record number of CueCat barcode scanners. (Although, we don’t make much money off them, they seem to have sped book entry.) With new features on the cusp of release, a major expansion planned, an employee-hunt is in the works, and continued, accelerating growth, 2007 is looking very bright indeed!

The New Year seems like good occassion to plug the recently-released New-Year-related comic novel The End as I Know It: A Novel of Millennial Anxiety by Kevin Shay. Shay (website), a high-school friend of mine***, has the distinction of writing for both Tim O’Reilly and Dave Eggers, appearing in Google Hacks and in various McSweeney’s collections including, as an editor, Created in darkness by troubled Americans. Here a review by the L.A. Times, and here’s the flap copy:

It’s 1998. Or, as Randall Knight sees it, Y2K minus two. Randall, a twenty-five-year-old children’s singer and puppeteer, has discovered the clock is ticking toward a worldwide technological cataclysm. But he may still be able to save his loved ones—if he can convince them to prepare for the looming catastrophe. That’s why he’s quit his job, moved into his car, and set out to sound the alarm.

The End as I Know It follows Randall on his coast-to-coast Cassandra tour. His itinerary includes the elementary schools that have booked him as a guest performer and the friends and relatives he must awaken to the crisis. When nobody will heed his warning, Randall spirals into despair and self-destruction as he races from one futile visit to the next. At the end of his rope, he lands with a family of newly minted survivalists in rural Texas. There, he meets a woman who might help him transcend his millennial fears and build a new life out of the shards of his old one.

So, cheers and thanks to all. I am excited to be part of what you are creating, and looking foward to doing what I can to make it better for you.

* … and tipsy, but I digress.
**And then turned around and asked $750 for the right to show the award logo. $750? That’s 75 year’s memberships! We turned them down. I suspect our fellow best-of-year services, iTunes and Skype did not.
***I programmed my first large-scale project with Kevin, a Zork-ish text-adventure set in a museum that has come alive.****
****Now made into a major motion picture starring Ben Stiller. As we never released the program, and I’ve never spoken of it, Kevin must have blabbed.

As promised, for Chris Santa has come up with a new, “graphical” widget–a widget usable in LiveJournal, MySpace and other environments that won’t permit JavaScript or frames. Unfortunately, Tim Santa didn’t finish the user-interface, with all its handy drop-downs, color selectors and so forth. So, for now, it’s up to you to customize the right URL. If this seems complicated, you might want to wait for the graphical interface. For the rest, here are your directions.

The graphical widget is an image with a highly-specific URL. You can build your URL piece by piece, checking the image in your browser. When you’ve got what you want, you will need to insert the image into your blog template. Usually, you will do this by adding <img src=”XXX” >, with XXX being the URL of the image, where appropriate.

The base URL is http://www.librarything.com/gwidget/widget.php?

To this base URL, you add parameters. You can add from one (just the user name) to fifteen, to control everything from what books are shown the colors they appear in. Each parameter must be separated by an & sign.

• view= your user name (default timspalding, but you don’t want that)
• type= what books to display; two options are “recent” and “random”
• tag= which tag to display (default: none)
• width= image width, in pixels (default: 200)
• fsize= font size, in points (default: 9)
• font= name of font to use (default: verdana). At present you can use “arial,” “arialuni” (if you have a lot of “special characters”), teletype, palatino, verdana
• num= number of books to display (default: 10)
• hbold=1 use bold text for the header (default: 0 off)
• tbold=1 use bold text for book titles (default: 0 off)
• top= text to display at the top of the widget (default: “Random Books From My Library” or “Random Books From My Library Tagged XYZ)
• ac= author text color (default: 000000 – black)
• bc= background color (default: ffffff – white)
• tc= title text color (default: 0000ff – blue)
• hc= header text color (default: 000000 – black)
• x= number of pixels from top and bottom to pad the text (default: 5 pixels)
• y= number of pixels from the left and right edges to pad the text (default: 5 pixels)

Notes:

• The widget doesn’t link anywhere. We suggest you link it to your profile or catalog (see your profile for the URL). You will need to an an HTML link around the image.
• The widget can’t have cover images. To display cover images, Amazon requires links to their service. A graphical widget can’t do that.

That’s what I have for now. Feel free to post questions, examples you’re proud of and so forth.

We have no shame.

Vote for LibraryThing in Mashable’s Social Networking Awards. (You vote by leaving a comment.) We’re in the “niche” category—I lobbied unsuccessfully for a social cataloging section—together with sites like CafeMom (“a place for moms”)*, SneakerPlay (MySpace for people who care about sneakers), Share Your Look (MySpace for fashionistas), AdFemme (MySpace for women in the advertising industry), NextCat (MySpace for actors, makeup artists and other Hollywood types), MyChurch (Facebook for congregations), Dianovo (MySpace for environmentists)**, our good friends Wordie, LibraryThing for words, and our favorite site, LibraryThing (SneakerPlay for booklovers).

*It’s depressing how much most “niche” sites ape MySpace.
**And people who enjoy splash screens. There’s also BeGreen, which is focused on global warming, but sports a front-page photo of two hot women standing in stylish red 60s or 70s convertible which is surely not a hybrid.

The audiobook of John Hodgman‘s The Area of My Expertise* is available for free on iTunes.

* Full title: An Almanac of Complete World Knowledge Compiled with Instructive Annotation and Arranged in Useful Order by Me, John Hodgman, a Professional Writer, in the Areas of My Expertise, which Include: Matters Historical; Matters Literary; Matters Cryptozoological**; Hobo Matters; Food, Drink, & Cheese (a Kind of Food); Squirrels & Lobsters & Eels; Haircuts; Utopia; What Will Happen in the Future; and Most Other Subjects; Illustrated with a Reasonable Number of Tables and Figures, and Featuring the Best of “Were You Aware of It?”, John Hodgman’s Long-Running Newspaper Novelty Column of Strange Facts and Oddities of the Bizarre
** Two people have tagged it cryptozoology, seven hoboes.

Hat tip: Neil Gaiman

Quick reminder: Post your Hanukkah book-pile photos to Flickr, tagged LibraryThingHanukkah. Winner gets a gift account. So far, we have only one book pile, with dreidels, and two not-very-booky entries (some very nice sufganyot and a family video from Steve Cohen at LibraryStuff). Deadline is 3pm Thursday, Dec. 21.

Feature teaser: It won’t make the end of Hanukkah, but LiveJournal and MySpace users should get a nifty, widgety Christmas present. Send encouragement to Chris (chrisgann).

Feature teaser 2: LC Authority Records, babee. Send fried donuts.

Neil Gaiman (American Gods, Neverwhere, etc.) has mentioned LibraryThing on his blog before, but today’s entry really caught our eye. It wasn’t just that he might join up, but he wrote a dead-on explanation of Unsuggester and what statistics mean and what they don’t. Here’s his reader’s email and his response:

Neil, I think the unsuggester might be broken. I’ve tried multiple titles, including yours, and there is always at least one or two items from my library on the list…

It’s not broken, it’s simply pointing out statistical anomalies—it’s not even talking about whether or not you’d like something (as some people have written to me, complaining they like books from both lists). It’s simply saying that it ought to be able to find a certain number of copies of book Y for people who own Book X, and it can’t. Statistically, people who have a copy of Mein Kampf on their shelves, for whatever reason, have fewer copies of Terry Pratchett books than might be expected. It may be that all the people with both Mein Kampf and Guards! Guards! just aren’t on LibraryThing yet, and once they join the anomaly will vanish. Or it may be that there’s something to be learned from that.

Would that he had been on Slashdot when that cry arose! Actually, part of the problem may be that people put their books in and try the Unsuggester the same day. But the calculations are pretty hairy, so I have to cache them for a while.

I don’t to “push” CueCats (cheap barcode scanners) too much, but when I dropped off the latest batch at the post office, I was told that Christmas delivery was getting dicey, even for Priority Mail*.

So, if you want to get your CueCats by Christmas, you’d better order them as soon as possible. Obviously, you can get a gift membership anytime.

*We don’t do Fedex. CueCats are a side-line for us; we intend to spend Dec. 24 shopping!