Just a reminder, you’ve still got a few hours to post your photos for the Harry Potter book pile contest…
The submissions so far (plus some more listed in the comments of this blog post).
Archive for July, 2007
Thursday, July 26th, 2007
LibraryThing pizza bash Saturday in Cambridge
So, it looks like Saturday is going to involve lightning, so the barbeque has morphed into a pizza party.
But we’re not getting just ordinary pizza! We’ll be ordering from Emma’s Pizza in Cambridge, MA, which is some seriously gourmet stuff (menu).* And we’ll have plenty of chips and hummus too.**
Everyone is invited. Bring a friend. If you can RSVP, great. If not, that’s fine. We’re probably going to need to order the pizza beforehand. We’re going to double the RSVP list. If you like, you can bring something .
When: Saturday, July 28th, 4pm to whenever.
Where: 15 Gurney Street, Cambridge MA (Google map). It’s about 15 minutes walking from the Square. You can also take the 72 (Huron) bus, and ask for the Fayerweather stop.
Parking: The City of Cambridge has declared Saturday LibraryThing day***. You can park anywhere on Gurney Street and between Gurney and Huron on Fayerweather.
Can’t wait to see everyone!
*When Emma’s was at the foot of Gurney Street, when I was young, it was decidedly less upscale. There were no tables—just a counter nobody used—and the ambiance was comprised of Emma berating her meek husband Greg in angry, staccato Armenian all day long. When the current owners bought it they moved it to Kendall Square, avoided marital conflict, added tables and the goat cheese, sun dried tomatoes and artichoke hearts today’s Cambridge requires. Somehow they managed to preserve what was good about it. It’s an amazing pizza.
**Alas, Tim’s trademark sigara börek will not fit with the rest of the meal.
***Untrue.
Labels: 1
Wednesday, July 25th, 2007
ReadItSwapIt becomes 10th swap site
A tenth book-swapping site has chosen to integrate with LibraryThing, ReadItSwapIt.
ReadItSwapIt is a UK site, and boasts some 125,000 titles available right now. Here’s the page on LibraryThing showing copies of a book on ReadItSwapIt. They’ve got a bang-up buzz page. It’s a credit-free system. This is a bold move, but not unattractive. As they explain it:
“Swapping on ReadItSwapIt is like swapping with friends. If you like each other’s books, you swap. If you don’t, either of you can reject the swap.
Many swap sites operate a credit system. That means, instead of swapping books, these sites allow you to swap credits. Any time anyone wants a book of yours, they give you a credit and you post the book out to them. You can then use this credit later to get a book sent to you by someone else.
This sounds great on the surface. But in practice, the problem with this system is that whenever anyone requests any of the books you have registered, you have to post out that book immediately. It doesn’t matter how inconvenient it might be for you to get to the post office that week. And what if you go on holiday? You have to let the site know. You have no control over the amount of swaps you make. You could end up acquiring loads of credits but not be able to find any books you like on the site. So you’re left with a load of worthless credits, no books and a big postage bill.”
That rings true to my experience. I posted a book to a swap site, and then dithered when I got the email. My wife decided she wanted to read it too. I ended up buying the book on Amazon and having it expressed to the swap person, just to save face. People like me need a more forgiving system.
I’m also impressed by their commitment to accessibility It’s way more than LibraryThing does.
Labels: swap
Wednesday, July 25th, 2007
Harry Potter and the Period of Quiet
The LibraryThing groups feature turns one tomorrow, followed shortly by Talk. I thought it would be fun to share the news-messages statistics for the Harry Potter Group, Hogwarts Express.
Check out the little boom for the movie (released July 11) and the crazy boom-bust-boom around when the book itself was released. For 24 hours, LibraryThing Harry Potter fans were reading, dammit.
I can report from experience that the rest of the world is still reading it. I went down to New York on business yesterday (and got caught in LaGuardia overnight, but that’s another story). The plane was like Harry Potter study hall.
REMINDER: We’re giving away prizes to 50 Harry Potter reviewers.
Labels: groups, harry potter, statistics
Tuesday, July 24th, 2007
Tagmash!
Short version: I’ve just gone live with a new feature called “tagmash,” pages for the intersections of tags. This is a fairly obvious thing to do, but it isn’t trivial in context. In getting past words or short phrases, tagmash closes some of the gap between tagging and professional subject classifications.
For example, there is no good tag for “France during WWII.” Most people just don’t tag that verbosely. Tagmash allows for a page combining the two: France, wwii. If you want to skip the novels, you can do france, wwii, -fiction. The results are remarkably good.
Tagmash pages are created when a user asks for the combination, but unlike a “search” they persist, and show up elsewhere. For example, the tagmash for France, Germany shows France, wwii as a partial overlap, alongside others. Related tagmashes now also show up on select tag and library subject pages, as a third system for browsing the limitless world of books.
Booooring? Go ahead and play a bit:
- Tagmash: alcohol, history
- Tagmash: dogs, humor
- Tagmash: historical fiction, renaissance
- Tagmash: erotica, zombies
- Tagmash: french, philosophy, -existentialism, -postmodernism
That’s the short version. But stop here and you’ll never know what Zombie Listmania is!
(full post over at Thingology, “Tagmash: Book tagging grows up”)
Labels: new feature, new features, tagging, tagmash
Saturday, July 21st, 2007
What’s happening now?
I’ve added some spice to the home page—a section showing the books added recently. It updates every five seconds. The “last five minutes” section can go above 600. This one was taken during a slow patch.* But, hey—two Harry Potters!
It’s an experiment to see if being more up-front about the size and dynamism of the site will draw more users in. As one user ably described it, LibraryThing’s home page looks about the same now as it did twelve months ago. See more discussion of the experiment here. Whether it stays on the home page, we’re going to playing with features like this.
Tomorrow: Tags grow up.
*Saturday night is our nadir. And this weekend is for reading Harry Potter, not playing with LibraryThing. I note, for example that the Hogwarts Express group, one of our most active, has gone from near hysteria to eerie quiet!
Labels: features
Friday, July 20th, 2007
Harry Potter Review Contest: 50 winners
It’s almost 12:01 here. Any moment now, the first copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will come available, and LibraryThing members across the US will start reading. (Some other parts of the world have already begun.) I wouldn’t be surprised if the first reviews were posted by noon tomorrow. Sounds like a good excuse for a contest, right?
We already have a Harry Potter Book Pile photo contest (one entry shown on the right). Well, how about a review contest too? The deal:
- Five reviewers get a $50 gift certificate to Amazon, Abebooks, Booksense or any independent bookseller.
- Fifty get a free membership (for them or as a gift), a handy CueCat barcode scanner, for entering more of their books, and eternal glory.
- We end it Monday, August 6.
LibraryThing is a gloriously supportive community. So we’re going to do it a little differently:
- We’re going to use the new review-rating feature.
Liam Weasley, with Scabbers
As many know, this only allows “thumbs-up” ratings.
- The five reviews with the most thumbs-ups will win the bigger prize.
- The rest will be randomly picked from all members who both wrote a review and voted for others’ reviews.
That is, we’re rewarding participation and generosity most of all.
I’m looking forward to seeing how it turns out.* We’re going to have anti-abuse measures in place, and we think the top five will be clean.** The interest level will be very high. After all, the Harry Potter group on LibraryThing has seen some 11,532 messages.
Have fun tonight. Me? I’m watching over the littlest Weasley, while my wife and niece party with the wizards.
*If we get a lot of sock-puppet votes, we may make the top-five part of the contest only count votes from established members.
**But I won’t be reading the reviews myself. I am stuck in book five, recently restarted. Arg.
Labels: contest, harry potter, labelled for your delectation, ocelot, reviews
Friday, July 20th, 2007
Me, at the LC!
The Library of Congress just posted the video of my talk there. Link and description over at Thingology.
Labels: library of congress, talks
Friday, July 20th, 2007
Project Ocelot: Social changes
New look; new connections controls.
This announces a series of major “social” improvements, previously dubbed “Project Ocelot.”* Most have already been released, but were never blogged.
They were talked about, however—and how! The first batch were released to the Recommended Site Improvements group on July 11, where they garnered 187 messages. Two pre-release topics, here and here, racked up another 228 messages. And there were spin-off topics too.
As usual around here, the conversation drove our work. It was a great fun to work through everything with everyone. In case there is any doubt, developing LibraryThing is a blast.**
Here’s a run-down of the changes:
1. Friends and Interesting Libraries. (On your profile.) LibraryThing now offers a number of different “connections” between members. Shared books are still primary, but we’ve added “Interesting Libraries,” “Friends” and “Private Watchlist.”*** Interesting libraries are a one-way thing, although the person you mark as interesting gets a heads-up notice. “Friends” is a mutual connection. “Private Watch Lists” are still private. You can edit your connections, and see who has you on their lists.
Previous “friend” proposals have caused some concern, so we took pains to overcome most objections. We made “interesting libraries” the first option, to keep focus on the books. Friends don’t show up unless both sides consent. And you can disable “friending” and block users. The term “friends” itself rubbed a few people the wrong way—I’ve only just gotten over it myself—but it’s success is clear. Since the changes went live 60% of connections ahve been “friend” connections.
2. Connection News. (On your profile.) You can now follow what your connections are doing on LibraryThing—the books they’re adding, the reviews they write, the books they rate. You can choose any of the new categories (eg., “Friends”) or the fifty users who share the most books with you. This is my favorite feature. It’s something LibraryThing was missing. I think it adds a lot.
Members who share my favorite authors.
3. Shared Favorites (Introduced today). (On all profiles.) Some time ago, we started allowing members to list their favorite authors. Well, now you can find out who shares them with you. Here, for example, is Abby’s list. Mine is too obscure still.
4. Rating Reviews (Introduced Wedensday). LibraryThing a supportive environment. We didn’t want the “vote wars” that Amazon books can have. So, we are allowing members to vote for good reviews with a thumbs-up. But there’s no thumbs-down.
We did add flags for Terms of Service abuse and for non-reviews. (Wherever reviews are found; the feature is being discussed here.)
5. “Also On” Connections. (On your profile.) This is the most technically interesting of the features. For some time, users have been able to record what other sites they belonged to, and their site handles there. “Also On” Connections parses your “Also Ons” to get your sites, and then checks public information from these sites to get your friends’ lists. These lists are then cross-checked against LibraryThing’s “Also On.”
Basically, it help you to fill in the gaps in your social network on LibraryThing. We made it when we ran a test and discovered that lots of users were friends on Flickr or BookMooch, but not on LibraryThing. Probably many didn’t even know their friend was on LibraryThing.
6. Invitations. (On your profile.) Altay made a nice, understated “Invitations” feature, that sends out invites to the people you select.
7. Search tweaks. (On search.) Search now allows “also on” searching.
Of course, we have more to do—a lot more, here, on the core cataloging features****, and with translation (one update there).
*Name discussed here.
**It’s odd, but LibraryThing involves its “users” in its development more than most open-source projects. Open source projects have more focus on developer-to-developer conversations. We almost never talk about technology, but always about features.
***There was a brief period when we had “public” and “private” contacts. All public contacts became “interesting libraries”.
****We should have some good announcements here soon.
Labels: new feature, new features, ocelot, reviews, social networking
Thursday, July 19th, 2007
LibraryThing party in Cambridge
As promised, we’re throwing a big cookout party, open to everyone. Bring your kids, your dogs, your books, and prepare yourself for Tim’s grilling prowess…
When: Saturday, July 28th, 4pm—whenever.
Where: 15 Gurney Street, Cambridge MA (Google map)*. It’s about 15 minutes walking from the Square. You can also take the 72 (Huron) bus, and ask for the Fayerweather stop.
RSVP! [Tim writes:] We’re throwing it at my parent’s house. My mother is beside herself with the idea that everyone with an internet connection will show up. She begs me to get some RSVPs. So, if you’re planning on coming, RSVP. But don’t let not RSVPing stop you.
We’ve applied for a don’t-ticket-us parking permit for the day, so you’ll be able to park on Gurney Street and a neighboring street.
Can’t wait to see everyone!
*Google has it wrong. The name of the street is Gurney. “Revere’s Corner” stems from a city of Cambridge sign for “Reeve’s Corner.” Cambridge and the neighboring communities do a lot of this—calling intersections “corners” and naming them after local worthies, mostly war dead (but not here). It’s a great thing to do, I suppose, but it sure messes up Google.
Labels: party
