At long last (and after some intensive database searching), we are pleased to present LibraryThing’s ten millionth book. Drumroll please…

The city in which I love you: poems, by Li-Young Lee was added just after noon last Saturday, by user vinodv.* We’re giving Vinod a lifetime account for this honor. According to his profile, Vinod is in Cambridge, MA—Tim’s hometown, and just across the river from Abby. Hey, we could be hand-delivering a CueCat to go with that membership!**

The celebration continues though—get your entries in for the biggest baddest book pile bonanza ever.

*This was also apparently the very first book Vindod added to his catalog. Quel distinction!
**Only half joking, I think.

In honor of hitting the big 10 million book mark this week, we’re having a book pile contest bonanza. We’re combining three contests into one here—Valentine’s Day, President’s Day, and of course, ten million books.

The challenge. Start taking pictures. Your book piles can be love themed, president themed, or just the coolest damn book photo you can create.

The prizes. We’ll pick five winners, who will each receive a year’s membership to LibraryThing. The grand prize winner will receive a $100 gift certificate. The catch? That hundred dollars must be spent entirely on one book. So start looking around Abe’s Rare Book Room…* (Amazon is fine too.)

The rules. Post your photos to Flickr, as usual. Tag them “LibraryThing10mil“.**

The deadline. The contest ends on February 16th, at midnight, EST. We’ll announce all the winners on Monday, February 19th.

*This is harder than you might think. A signed and first edition copy of The Little Prince sold for $10,450 last year, and that was only the 7th most expensive book sold in 2006 on Abe. Sadly, we will not be buying you this $55,471 copy of The Tale of Peter Rabbit. So if you had the $100, what one book would you try to get?
**Users who already posted Valentine’s or Presidents photos to Flickr after I said this, can you change and/or add the tag LibraryThing10mil? Sorry and thanks.

Until now, work combination was an author thing, if two works didn’t share authors they couldn’t be combined. This is good enough most of the time. But some works have multiple authors with different ones taking the “main author” spot in different catalogs. And it didn’t work with authorless works.

For now, you can’t combine any work, but only ones that share an ISBN. The list of potential combinations is available on each work’s “book information” page (), at the bottom of the page. If it proves useful and popular, I may move it.

Here’s a good example—three editions of (multi-author) Cluetrain Manifesto that weren’t combined with the main one:

But not every suggestion is good. Here’s The Rule of Four. I have no idea what that Babichev book is doing there. It might be member error, a source error, a publisher reusing ISBNs or a rogue publishing reusing a known number instead of paying for a new one. Anyway, I suggest you don’t combine it!

Unfortunately, this doesn’t fix authors generally. The Cluetrain Manifesto is still listed under a single “main” author. We hope to change that soon.

Frustrated that Terry Prattchet and Neil Gaiman keep getting combined? Unforunately, the system makes a few bad combination suggestions, and now and then somebody takes it up on them. To solve this I’ve added a feature to the author pages:

I kicked things off by permanently divorcing Edward Gibbon from Mark Twain (!). But I’ll let you guys tackle Gaiman. I’ve deputized the Combiners group (which, in the best LT tradition, sprang into being spontaneously) as the place to fight out whether Jack London and Emile Zola are really the same author.

More changes along these lines soon, including visible logs for combination action.

PS: I also cut down on the number of “Also known as” names visible, unless you click “see complete list.” Nabokov was getting absurd…

In continuation with our celebration of 10 million books, today we’ve also hit 303 LibraryThing Authors.* Sara Ryan / sararyan just became our three hundred and third LibraryThing Author. The best part? Sara’s also a librarian! Her first book, Empress of the World was excellent, so watch for her second novel, The Rules for Hearts, which comes out in April.

Keep watching for more of the 10 million books celebration blogging!

*I must not have been paying attention when number 300 must have breezed by me, but it’s always good to celebrate a palindrome, I say. Who doesn’t love a palindrome?

On Saturday LibraryThing acquired its ten millionth book. Ten million is a bunch. Ten million means something. LibraryThing is no longer a “worthless jumble” of books and tags. It’s, it’s…

• A meaningful jumble of books and tags
• A hook to hang a bunch of pretty charts and graphs
• An excuse for a book pile contest
• A cause for celebration, and a party
• A special cause for celebration for the guy who added number 10,000,000
• An occasion to lay out future plans and goals

And probably a few other things. Anyway, it’s big enough that it won’t fit in one blog post, and with everything we have to do and all the vinho verde we need to drink this week, I’m expecting ten-million blog posts to drag on for days.

A meaningful jumble of books and tags. Ten million books translates into a piles of data, and piles of data means fun with statistics. And we’ve been having fun.

Today I added a new “combined” recommendation list. It draws on LibraryThing’s five existing recommendation algorithms to come up with a “best” list. I’ve replaced the longer list of recommendations on the work pages, wth a link to the Suggester page, where you can see all the lists.* (I’d be interested to hear if people appreciate the simplification or still want the full lists on the work pages.) Combined recommendations are available for 230,000 works. Because of variable work popularity, this amounts to recommendations for 72% of all the books in people’s libraries.

Alongside books, LibraryThing’s tags have also been growing. Although we’ve rarely celebrated milestones, tags are the untold story of LibraryThing. LibraryThing members have added thirteen million of them–an unprecented web of meaning in the book world. Check out a tag like chick lit, cyberpunk or paranormal romance and tell me what you think. I think LibraryThing members have arrived at something close to the paradigmatic reading list for these hard-to-pin-down genres.

On the subjet of tags, I recently did a statistical sample of Amazon’s book tagging. I estimate that since November 2005, Amazon customers have added about one-million book tags. When LibraryThing, a niche site, collects 13 times as many book tags as Amazon, one of the top-ten most visited sites, something is up. I’ll blog about it soon, but I think the basic answer is clear. Letting people tag “their stuff” works like gangbusters. Asking customers to tag “your stuff” doesn’t. People make their beds every day. But nobody goes down to the local Sheraton to fluff their pillows.

*Not quite. There are actually ten recommendation lists at play since, when the recommendations are sparse, we factor in a “flip-around” of the recommender-recommended relationship.

“You are what you read” has turned into a bit of a mini-meme, with Chuck Close-style book cover portraits popping up all over. In addition to David Louis Edelman’s post that started it all, we have Geoff Coupe’s, followed by two excellent blog posts.

Mark Edon (that’s him at right) posted a Mac-oriented tutorial, including a very useful method for using Safari to quickly download all the images from the “All Your Covers” page.

4:14 has posted an extensive PC-oriented tutorial, replete with screenshots, which also gives guidance on grabbing images, as well as AndreaMosaic tips. And in a new twist, it goes all postmodern by using book covers to make a mosaic of… a book cover.

We love these things. Send in more, and we’ll start a gallery.

Anyone in the Boston area should head to the Boston Public Library tomorrow (Saturday Feb 3rd) for a LibraryThing meet-up. (Directions to the BPL are here). It’s planned to coincide with the Friends of the Boston Public Library booksale.

We’re planning on meeting by Novel restaurant (first floor of the McKim building) at 2pm.

Hope to see you there!

We’ve always pushed the idea that your books are you. Well, now you can see yourself on a single page.

We were inspired by two very cool projects: LibraryThing author David Louis Edelman‘s post about creating photo mosaics of himself from his book covers, and a post by Adam of Tailors Today about creating a poster of every book he’s ever read.

In both cases, one of the challenges was dealing with LibraryThing’s 100-cover limit in “Cover view.” So we made a special nothing-but-the-covers page.

The new page doesn’t replace the “Cover view” in your catalog (which remains the easiest way to visually browse your library), but book cover arts and crafts projects like this will be a little easier with everything consolidated in one place.

Check it out, discuss it here and let us know if you do anything as cool as David and Adam.

Our friends over at Abe have created two new “rooms,” one for Science Fiction and one for Fantasy. Both sport a modest but low-key and engaging grab-bag of content. Notable among them are an interview with Elizabeth Bear (also a LibraryThing author), info on Sci-Fi and Fantasy award winners—something LibraryThing should do—and a list of the most expensive Science Fiction and Fantasy Books Sold in 2006. A $8,258.40 copy of 1984 tops the list.

Classifying 1984 as Science Fiction rubs me the wrong way, but I shouldn’t complain too hard. Three hundred thirty-eight LibraryThing users also see it that way, and tagged it so. Even so it falls low on the tag page for Science Fiction, because it has a relatively low “tag salience”—it’s tagged Science Fiction a lot, but not compared to the book or the tag’s popularity overall. By contrast, 1984 heads up the dystopia tag, which makes a lot of sense, I think.

Lastly, the pricey books page has a sidebar with the most expensive sci-fi and fantasy books listed on Abe. The winner is a $75,000 copy of Philip K. Dick‘s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, inscribed to Tim Powers, “the warmest, the most witty, the most human & least android person I know, the best friend I have ever had.” That does sound like a remarkably find (and no, we’re not getting a cut for saying it).

I’m feeling generous, so I’m extending the deadline for the Black History Month bookpile contest photos by a day. You now have until Tuesday the 30th at 3pm (EST). Post ’em to Flickr, tag them “LibraryThingBHM“, and we’ll post the winner on the blog on the first of February.

The many faces of John

Abby and I have hired John McGrath (user: JohnMcGrath), the man behind Wordie and Squirl, as a full-time developer. LibraryThing isn’t “eating” either site, both of which will remain independent, but we’re getting their developer.

I’ve blogged about Squirl and Wordie before*. Squirl, which he co-founded with Steve de Brun, is “LibraryThing for collectibles.” You can catalog things like scrimshaw and Pez dispensers. Someone entered their Hobo sculptures. You can do books too although—between you and me—LibraryThing does them better.

Squirl caught my eye when it came out. The guy lived in my town! (Portland, ME is not exactly a Web 2.0 mecca). More importantly, it was the rare (semi-)competitor that “didn’t suck®.” But Wordie is my favorite. Billed as “Flickr without the pictures,” Wordie is basically LibraryThing for people who collect words. Here is my list of products named after their (purported) place of origin and another users’ words that describe flow.**

John attempts to entertain Liam. Doesn’t he look French?

I was impressed by the idea; it’s silly in a good way. And I appreciate the way he put it together–quicky and guided by users. When MESDA asked me to talk about building web aps, I invited John to split my time. We ended up saying the same thing, differently. With Wordie especially, John had come to embrace playful, breakneck and user-guided development, but he was a little more careful about it.***

Over the next months with John, you can expect things to get smoother. Our code and databases, the core parts of which have been done by one person, has acquired a fair bit of “cruft.” Cleaning this out may slow us down in the short run, but there are two of us now, and a cleaner, more orderly under-programming will provide a better platform to do what LibraryThing is known for–relentless, playful, creative and user-assisted innovation.

Incidentally, John did not replace Chris. Although John’s got good Unix chops, he’s not a database administrator. (This week, however, he’s been playing one on TV.) A one-time Java developer, John developed Squirl and Wordie in Ruby on Rails****. In joining LibraryThing, John has been forced to cage his agile mind in the rubber prison of functional PHP programming. He’s taking it like a man.

So, welcome to John. Although we’ve started out with a couple months’ employment contract—there’s a chance he’ll have to take off—I expect him to be around a while, do some great work and make you guys happy.

First up, John, together with a superstar contractor, is going to be making everyone unhappy, taking the site down for a few hours. He will announce the time later on today. Don’t kill the messenger. The action is necessary and will increase the system’s underlying stability, which has not been very good in the last few days.

*According to John, the LT plug was actually a big factor in Wordie’s success. Wordie eventually landed in the Wall Street Journal, but on Christmas Day. That’s like making a hole-in-one when your best friend is looking the other way.
**Anyone who uses boustrophedon is a friend of mine, and lo and behold 15 other people have it on their lists!
***If John was Socrates, I was Diogenes, “the insane Socrates.” Diogenes threw aside convention by living in a tub and defecating in the street. I don’t use Subversion. The parallels are unmistakable.
****The Java link is Paul Graham’s great talk on “Great Hackers,” which is, inter alia, a savagely funny attack on Java developers. I was looking for similar pages about hating Ruby, to tweak John, and all I could find were pages like that one—”I hate it because it’s spoiled me.” Damn. Can something be so universally acclaimed and STILL be good? Note the blogger’s sexist but not wrong comparison: “Coding in [Rails] is like talking to a intelligent, beautiful woman. Coding in PHP is like talking to a pretty but stupid girl. Coding in ASP.NET***** is like trying to explain quantum mechanics to a miserable failure.”
*****Another of our competitors is in .NET, something Microsoft has started touting. Look, a site with 1-5% of LibraryThing’s books, traffic and users runs on our software! Paul Graham’s anecdote applies here:

“A couple years ago a venture capitalist friend told me about a new startup he was involved with. It sounded promising. But the next time I talked to him, he said they’d decided to build their software on Windows NT, and had just hired an eminent Windows NT developer to be their chief technical officer. When I heard this, I thought, these guys are doomed. One, the CTO couldn’t be a first rate hacker, because to become an eminent Windows NT developer he would have had to use NT voluntarily, multiple times, and I couldn’t imagine a great hacker doing that; and two, even if he was good, he’d have a hard time hiring anyone good to work for him if the project had to be built on NT.”

If there’s one thing I hate it’s “corporate HR” emails, those icky coded messages about comings and goings. Did that guy quit? Was he fired? Is he leaving for the competition? Was he caught behind a fica plant with the CFO’s niece? Meet me in my cubicle and I’ll give you the scoop!

The scoop is that Chris no longer works for LibraryThing. He wrote about it on his own blog, Aspiring CTO. I disagree with much said there, particularly the idea that I don’t like him. But I can’t stand up for users tagging however they like and deny that everyone sees things the way they see them.

As he writes, he loved LibraryThing, and did a lot for it. Most notably he architected and implemented the transition to a scalable server and database structure. The traffic data below, taken from our stats program, is a trophy of sorts to that:

Chris did everything from July on. And during that period, server problems actually went down. And Chris did a number of other valuable projects. When I finish the user-interface, I think he will be best remembered for his elegant LiveJournal-friendly widget.

So, my thanks to Chris for the work he did for LibraryThing. I wish him the best in his future plans. PillHelp in particular seems likely to take off. Since more people take pills than want to catalog their books, I suspect he’ll have some even more challenging scaling issues to deal with.

Members saw his post and started thanking him on Talk. Go ahead and leave comments here or there.

*November is in some metrics higher than December because we got Slashdotted, producing a gigantic two-three-day wave that didn’t last. The underlying fundamentals—users, books in system, money—have continued their accelerating acceleration.

City Lights in Sylva, North Carolina

We’ve just added City Lights Bookstore of Sylva, North Carolina (map) to our local bookstore program.

City Lights is a great illustration of what we’re trying to do—help local, mostly (but not necessary) independent bookstores and the LibraryThing members who love them. City Lights describes Sylva as:

… a small Main Street town nestled between the Great Smokies and the Balsams, two mountain ranges in the highest part of the southern Appalachians. Our goal is to share the literature of the Appalachian region with the world and the world of good books with our community.

If you’re in the area, go ahead and edit your profile to have availability and pricing information shown on all work pages.

Thanks to Chris Wilcox of City Lights for finding out about us and sending us a data file out of the blue. (We like it when the data comes to us! )

For more information on our bookstore program check out Thingology for the XML format. We are also now accepting standard Booksense data feeds, a simple tab-delimited format booksellers upload to Booksense.

In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day (the first since the death of his wife, the NYT reminds me), we announce a Black History Month bookpile contest.

Post your photos to Flickr, with the tag “LibraryThingBHM” by 3pm on Jan. 29th, and we’ll announce the winner on the blog on February 1st.

We have a whole bunch of bookpile contests queued up now, so if this one doesn’t strike your fancy, you can start preparing your piles for the upcoming celebration of 10 million books, Valentine’s Day, Women’s History Month, and more. We’re also always looking for ideas for contests, so send those along too (I’m perfectly willing to have a Groundhog day contest, for example, if anyone thinks they could pull together a book pile for that)!

Yesterday we hit nine million books cataloged. We’re plan to make a HUGE deal out of ten million—a super-duper book pile contest, games, prizes, hay rides, a moon walk—but I’ll let nine million slide with the following:

• Going from eight million to nine million took less than a month. We’re speeding up!
• The book nine million was the espionage thriller Triple by Ken Follett. It was added by long-time foxsilver, who gets a free gift account for his luck.
• If LibraryThing were a “real” library, we’d now be the 10th largest in the country (ALA fact sheet)

Reminder: We’re looking for a database and systems administrator. If you are one, or know of one, let us know. We’d love to get someone local, but telecommuting is also a possiblity. LibraryThing runs on Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. We offer health, dental and boredom insurance.

My apologies on some projects (author disambiguation, search) taking too long. We’re pretty consumed with the job hunt right now. We did just hire a new developer so once we can get back to developing, we’re going to gallop.

I’ve added a new and often powerful recommendation engine. It has a long and awkward name: Books with similar library subjects and classifications.* So far, I’ve only got it on Suggester pages.

It feeds off three pieces of “traditonal” library data:

• Subjects (mostly Library of Congress Subject Headings),
• Library of Congress Classifications (LCC), and
• Dewey Decimal Classifications (DDC)

The recommendations are special in a few ways:

• They can be very “targeted”
• There is no “popularity” threshhold; books with just one copy in the system often have recommendations**, and it will recommend obscure stuff too
• It works better for non-fiction than for fiction
• It fails in interesting ways

At its core, the system looks for shared library data. So if book B has subject S, all the other books with subject S get a “vote”; the winners are the books that share the most subjects with the suggesting book. The algorithm goes beyond this by leveraging the inherent hierarchy of the three systems, apportioning successively “smaller” votes to ascending levels of the hierarchy. Popularity is also taken into consideration, but as little more than a tie-breaker.

At it’s best, the system is spooky. So Into Thin Air‘s other recommendations are spread over Everest, general mountaineering and adventure books. But the “Similar subjects and classifications” recommendations leads with Kenneth Kamler‘s Doctor on Everest : emergency medicine at the top of the world : a personal account including the 1996 disaster, a reasonably obscure (5 members) personal account of the same 1996 expedition. Other times the results are mixed or even odd. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason pulls up commentaries on itself, but also the acclaimed but seemingly unrelated seminal work on the anthopology of magic, E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, oracles, and magic among the Azande. Why? Because both receive the Library of Congress Subject Headings:

• Causation
  

Strange bedfellows, perhaps.

*Got a better name? Let us know, seriously.
**Ironically, twice as many works have recommendations (219,000 vs. 120,000 for “people who have X also have Y”), but because they are more evenly distributed by work popularity, half as many books have recommendations (2.6 million vs. 5.9 million).

We just added a web developer—anouncement coming*—and we’re hiring again. This time we’re looking for a crackerjack systems and database administrator, ideally one based near Portland, Maine. (We can hope, can’t we?)

• LibraryThing runs on Linux, PHP and MySQL 5 over a small cluster of servers located in Portland, ME.
• You must have extensive experience in MySQL database administration.
• You must be able to step into a high-volume site in transition and experiencing rapid growth.
• You must be comfortable with rigorous demands of a startup and of sysadmin work.
• Web development chops, love of books and knowledge of library systems valued.

We’re looking to fill a full-time position, but will also consider contractors, particularly if they’re in the area.

Salary and benefits negotiable. But I’ll tell you, you can see the sea from the LibraryThing headquarters and we’ve got gold-plated health and dental!

We’re looking to fill this soon, so act now. Contact tim[at]librarything.com or call 207 899-4108.

*Hint: He’s been mentiond on the blog before…

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!

An early Christmas present for us—we made PC Magazine’s five best services of 2006. They say:

“Heavens! Another tag-happy social-networking site that’s actually worth using!”

Well, I’m not going to argue with that!

We’re pretty honored, particularly since one of the other winners was Skype. Not such bad company to find ourselves in.

We don’t have a picture, so we grabbed this one from Flickr (mamamusings/Liz Lawley***)

Happy Hanukkah from LibraryThing!*

Help! LibraryThing doesn’t have a Hanukkah picture! We’ve got 6 days left. Pile up your Hannukah books? Go with silver and blue? Add a dreidel? Latkes? It’s up to you.

Post it to Flickr** with the tag “LibraryThingHanukkah,” and we’ll feature our favorite on the blog (and on the home page if we can get our act together). We’ll give you a free gift subscription, for you or someone else.

Deadline: Since Flickr can take a while to post pictures the official deadline is 3pm Thursday, Dec. 21.

*Linkfest! Tags: Hanukkah, latkes, menorah (one book!?), Wikipedia: Hanukkah, Judas Maccabeus on the Web (Isidiore-of-Seville.com), and Judah Maccabee the Huggable Hanukkah Hero.
**If you really need to email it to tim[at]librarything.com. But Flickr is bett(e)r.
***In a TRULY freakish coincidence, Ms. Lawley is the RIT prof./Microsoft consultant working on a behind-the-firewall “enterprise” Del.icio.us/LibraryThing-ish thing (see her blog post on the topic, and see Stowe Boyd too, with some comments by me from when I thought she was “just” a Microsoft developer). I didn’t realize where I’d heard the name until I after I posted this, but I guess it makes sense. Social-software people use Flickr a lot, get rated highly. It seems like a big world, but really it’s small!

LibraryThing memberships make great gifts!

Lifetime memberships ($25)
Yearly memberships ($10)

Or what about CueCats as stocking stuffers? Nothing says holiday joy like a barcode scanner shaped like a cat, I say. Functional and decorative!

And don’t forget our store at CafePress, ThingStore. Everything at ThingStore is offered at the CafePress base price—we’re not marking it up, and not making any money on it—so buy it simply for the joy of wearing it.

I’ve been using LT as a “what not to buy” tool lately (no, I’m not just Unsuggesting). It’s good for seeing what books my niece already owns, so I don’t end up buying duplicates (plus, it’s slightly more discreet than driving to her house and bookshelf snooping). In short, proof that you should give memberships to your friends and family—it benefits you both!

Update: I’ve been informed that PopMatters included LibraryThing as part of their 2006 Holiday Gift Guide (“shopping for the best pop culture stuff”)!

Porter Square Books in Cambridge, MA has become the second bookstore to integrate with LibraryThing.

As with the first bookstore, Shaman Drum of Ann Arbor, MI, we’re doing this to please local members, not to make a buck. There were no string attached, and LibraryThing does not make any money from it.

If they’re your local bookstore, just edit your profile to note that and you’ll get availability and pricing information on all work pages. If they’re not your bookstore, go ahead and find out if your bookstore can integrate. To work with Porter Square Books, we set up a simple upload form, instead of requiring an XML feed. If they’re right, there are about 30 bookstores around the country that generate similar feeds for Booksense. I’ll post about that in more detail later over on Thingology.

I grew up in Cambridge and spent most of my life there. But I moved to Maine three years ago, and I haven’t set foot in Porter Square Books, and I haven’t met the people who work there. I hear it’s great, and Dale, the director, was a pleasure to work with. Are any other Thingamabrarians Cantabrigians* or Somerville-ers**? Anyone go there?

*Hey! That’s what we’re called.
**Note that Cambridge has a nifty Latin form. Somerville does not.