Archive for the ‘new features’ Category

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

Author interviews posted

Our first two author interviews, first seen in the revamped State of the Thing newsletter, are live on the site itself. The interviews are:

Abby and I enjoyed reading the books—we both read from Bad Mother (thumbs up, but it will tweak you), and Abby read The Song is You (thumbs up)*. Philips’ interview convinced me I should check him out. “A child actor, a jazz musician, a speechwriter, a dismally failed entrepreneur, and a five-time Jeopardy champion” and a huge fan of Pale Fire? Will he come to our next party?

Want to do an author interview? Know someone who might? We’re looking for authors, and we’d rather get great ideas from members than declare open-season on our inboxes from publisher PR types. Email abby@librarything.com about it.

We have a number of other things authors and publishers can “do” with LibraryThing on the about page. We’ll be sprucing it up in time for Book Expo America in New York.


*I think we have to stop saying if we liked a book, as we’ll eventually read one we positively hate and “Check out this interview with Mr-Can’t-Write” probably won’t win us any friends.

Labels: authors, librarything authors, new features

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

State of the Thing

Our monthly “State of the Thing” newsletter just went out.

We “did it up,” with a full HTML version and some special features. Notably, the May newsletter includes our first two author interviews:

Ayelet Waldman, author of the Mommy Track Mysteries, and now Bad Mother
Arthur Phillips, author of The Egyptologist and The Song is You

We ask penetrating questions like “Describe your library” and “Is your husband really that perfect?” We’ll be doing more of them as time goes by, and making them available on the site generally.

For now, however, you can only get them in the newsletter. So if you want to get a copy, be sure to edit your account preferences. We’ll send you out a copy soon after.

Labels: new features

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

Compare your library with others’

I’ve added a new “Compare: Connections” feature, similar to the Legacy Library feature. But instead of munging statistics about Jefferson and Yeats, the new feature works on your friends, interesting libraries and other connections lists.

Members: find yours here.
Others: here are mine.

As with the Legacy Libraries page, you get a couple options. First, you choose which list you want to look at—friends and so forth. Then try:

  • Shared books, books. Shows the most popular books you also share.
  • Shared books, people. Shows all the connections, with how much they share.
  • Top books. Shows the most popular books, whether or not you share them. It’s a “Most Popular Books” for your friends and other connections.

I’m anticipating some time-outs on larger libraries. The calculations here are brutal—100MB of RAM is not atypical. I’ll mitigate them tomorrow.

A feature for LibraryThing Authors. I’ve also added a small, but cute feature for LibraryThing Authors. In certain circumstances, LibraryThing Authors now get a “Your Readers” list, alongside their friends and so forth. Right now, these lists are appearing on all author and work pages—again, only if you are a LibraryThing author. They aren’t showing up in the “Compare” feature because many authors have hundreds or thousands of readers, and the system can’t handle all that calculation right now.

Talk about both features on this blog or here.

Labels: new features

Monday, May 11th, 2009

Who reads an author?

I’ve “brought back” top member lists on author pages, significantly enhancing them with lists that show the author’s readers among your friends and connections, and among Legacy Libraries (eg., C. S. Lewis had a lot of Twain).

Also new, LibraryThing Authors now get a new “Your Readers” connections category, so they can find out what your readers think of a given author or work.

Discuss here

Labels: authors, librarything authors, LT author, new features

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

Commune with the dead

Can you guess what they are?

I’ve made some major changes to members’ Legacy Library pages, bringing this wonderful member project—the private libraries of over 100 readers from the past—closer than ever before.

It has never been easier to compare the reading of Jefferson and Adams (427 books!), Hemmingway and Fitzgerald. And is has never before been possible to compare that of Tupac Shakur and LibraryThing’s Australian systems administrator John Dalton!

The core, default feature is a list of Legacy Libraries and the books they share with you. New features include:

  1. You can get it book-by-book, instead of person-by-person.
  2. From that, you can now see the top shared books across the Legacy Libraries, with you or any subset.
    The top books list is somewhat surprising. I’ve pasted it on the right, with the titles blacked out. See if you can guess number one. For combination reasons it’s not the Bible, but it’s probably not any of the others that leap immediately to mind. The top books between signers of the Declaration of Independence is also quite surprising. And why on earth did three American presidents bother to acquire General view of the agriculture in the county of Somerset?!
  3. The libraries are broken down into groups, so you can see what you share with actors, musicians, politicians, etc.
    Among these are the splinter project, the Libraries of Early America, which Jeremy, the Legacy Library project leader, is working on in collaboration with archives, libraries and museums across the country.
  4. You can filter everything in all sorts of clever ways.
  5. Although the page is a dynamic explorer, it provides a permalink to send to friends and a nifty “Share on Twitter” button. (Did you know you can enter your books through Twitter?)

Later today I’ll push out a podcast I did with Jeremy, a long but enjoyable romp through the legacy libraries, cataloging, the meaning of books through history and book-love generally.

Discussion going on here.

Labels: legacy libraries, new features

Sunday, April 26th, 2009

What’s hot?

I’ve added a “Hot topics” category to Talk.

Heat is calculated every hour, and is based on posts and viewers in the the last 48 hours. It adjusts for the length of posts, so one-line posts don’t count as much—You hear me Drop a Word, Add a Word? A topic with a lot of flags is penalized and it adjusts the numbers slightly to prevent groups from dominating the list.

More heat on its way…

Labels: new features

Thursday, April 16th, 2009

“New” catalog look/features

We’ve gone live with a number of aesthetic and functional changes to members’ catalog pages.

Some examples, or see my catalog.


Before

After

Before

After

Together the changes aim to:

  • Look better. Those big clunky icons have been with us since the beginning—August 2005. The original files are on an old OS9 iMac. I’m sad to see them go, but man, they were clunky. LibraryThing is something of a “ransom note,” but we’re moving toward uniformity and beauty. You’ll see the little icons popping up elsewhere.
  • Prepare the way for collections. Collections was too deeply integrated into the “new” catalog to bring it live separately. Doing both at the same time would have been a lot of work too. We’re getting closer*.
  • Address some usability issues, particularly confusion over how to sort and “what the little numbers mean.”
  • Speed up the page. The new page uses CSS sprites, moving from dozens of images to one.**
  • Fix some bugs.

Some things are missing, including:

  • Collections!
  • Better “covers” display. Mike is working on that. We decided to go ahead without him.
We’ve started two conversations:
  • New Catalog #1: Larger issues. Larger reflections on what we did. For the sake of argument, assume that it’s “working” for you, and concentrate on whether you like how it works.
  • New Catalog #2: Bugs and small issues. Small issues, particularly ones we can just fix. I want these sequestered, so we aren’t stuck with messages 2-20 in the main thread being about some trivial bug that got fixed.


*At least you’re all now on the catalog we’ve been using for months, anyway.
**As Chris says, “Tim has found a hammer.” It’s all CSS-sprite-shaped nails to me now.

Labels: design, new features

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

Widget statistics and work page customization

Widget Statistics: The new LibraryThing widgets now have their own statistics page, so you can see how often your widgets are visited.

Check out your Widget Statistics or Luke’s account, with some data.

The graph has an exceedingly nifty feature that makes the lines the same color as the background of the widget or, failing that, the main font color. This makes it easy to see which is which and is the kind of nice little detail Luke enjoys putting in.

Discuss it here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/62183

Reminder: There is a best widget contest going on.

Work page customization. Work pages are now customizable, with each section collapsible, and rearrangeable with a nifty drag-and-drop action, remembered between sessions. The feature is quite powerful—a lot cooler than I’d have thought possible.

Discuss it here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/62134

Collections progress. Follow our collections progress here.

Labels: new features

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009

Widgets get a lot better

We’ve just brought live new, improved widgets, available from the make widget page.

Some highlights:

  • New “animated” style cycles through your covers in a oddly mesmerizing way.
  • Widgets are extensively customizable, so you can fit them to your blog without any special knowledge.
  • Power users can do more, with Javascript and CSS customization. Check out Chris’ blog for stylish use.*
  • The new widgets are shareable (an example) so members can show off and swap styles. (Yes, we’ll be having a widget-creation contest soon.)
  • Widget links don’t go off somewhere, but open up a slick lightbox “mini-book” page, with your information and (optional) links, to LibraryThing and elsewhere. You can, of course, fill in your Amazon Associates code, if you want to make money off your widget.
  • Widgets now include (optionally) tags, ratings and reviews. You can filter by reviews and tags too.
  • The code is good—based on our improved JSON Books API and designed not to slow down your page (they’re “lazy-loading”). Weirdly this can make the widget look slow. That’s because it’s not slowing down the rest of the page!
  • Internationalized from the ground up.
  • Orcas, baby!

Go ahead and make a widget.

Talk about it here, or on Talk.

Luke! Widgets were helmed by new employee Luke (member: LibraryThingLuke), who wrote most of the core code, all the styling options, the share system and so forth. Other LibraryThing people helped. Chris—hard at work on collections, we promise—chipped in some attractive styles. Mike wrote the crucial cover-animation code, something he’s been working on for our upcoming Facebook application. I made sure Luke got a list of changes every morning, including at least one thing I wanted the other way the day before.

Luke offered the following thumbnail bio:

“Luke Stevens lives in Portland, Me with his wife and three kids. He enjoys single malt scotch and silver-age comic books. He rides a motorcycle from the early 80’s that elicits laughter from his evil co-workers. Twitter: saintlukas; blog: sacremoo.com.”


*Chris swears by Colourlovers.com.

Labels: new feature, new features, widgets

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

LibraryThing Mac Screensaver

At the end of our Week of Code, Chris and I put together the RSS feed and directions you need to turn the built-in Mac OS X screensaver into a LibraryThing Screen Saver.

To do it you’ll need to grab the following URL: http://www.librarything.com/labs-screensaver.php?userid=timspalding and change “timspalding” to your user name (public users only, of course). Then watch the video.

Update: Does anyone know of an easy way to make a Windows one?

Labels: mac, new feature, new features, osx, screensavers

Sunday, February 8th, 2009

Male or Female?

I’ve added a new meme page for “Male of Female?” (see yours or mine).

The page is similar to Dead or Alive?. It’s based on our Common Knowledge, an editable, fielded wiki for author and work information. So if someone shows up under “Uncertain” you can edit in the right gender.

This feature is, of course, frosting. The cake was released Saturday: Introducing Distinct Authors. Check that out.

Labels: authors, new feature, new features

Saturday, February 7th, 2009

Distinct authors, phase 1 / Steve Martin is funny again

Short version. I’ve added a mechanism to “split” distinct authors with the same name. You can find it on the right of any author page, under “Author Disambiguation.” The feature is only partially rolled-out, without separate pages for distinct authors or other rammifications for the LibraryThing system.

Long version. Since its inception, LibraryThing has been plagued by the “Steve Martin” problem. We all know Steve Martin, the comic and author of Shop Girl. But what about Steve Martin the author of Britain’s Slave Trade, Sold! How to Make it Easy for People to Buy from You or some book about Newfoundland ships. Why was the original wild-and-crazy-guy writing such evidently unfunny books—or who were these other people?

The problem is deep in the data. Libraries have a system for disambiguating authors, called Authority Control, based on coming up with authorized forms of a name and adding dates and other metadata to make them unique, and then applying these forms across the books. Authority control is a good idea—if often problematic to implement—but it falls down in the face of LibraryThing’s data. Libraries don’t coordinate their authority control as much as you’d think, and LibraryThing draws from almost 700 libraries. And even if authority control worked in libraries, 90% of LibraryThing content comes from other sources, mostly Amazon. This data has no concept of authority control. (See Steve Martin at Amazon, for example.)

In solving the problem, I decided to ignore how libraries solved the issue and concentrate on how LibraryThing could do it most easily. Authority control requires librarians to assemble data (eg., birth and death dates) about name variants before a split is made. (Thus was born librarians’ unfortunate policy of putting out hits on individuals they could not otherwise distinguish.*) Although LibraryThing members have done an amazing job finding birth and death dates, it was still a lot of work. And a full authority-control solution would have members updating each other’s records with the “authorized” forms of the names!

I felt a better way could be found. Instead of establishing unique names and pushing them to records, members could split works arbitrarily, and the authors would come to be known by the name they share and the works that cluster under them. This is actually an old system—calling someone “the author of Ivanhoe” or “the one who wrote the Parthian history.” And, as with other features of LibraryThing cataloging, it accords with how regular people talk about. In a real-world situation, like a meeting of Newfoundland commedians, you wouldn’t refer to “Martin, Steve, 1945-” and “Martin, Steve, 1947-” but “Steve Martin, you know, the one who wrote Shopgirl” and “Steve Martin, the one who wrote that book about that boat.”

How it works. To split an author, find the area on the right labelled “Author Disambiguation.” It will take you to a splitting page; here’s Steve Martin’s. This page allows you to assign all the author’s works to numbers. As you assign the works, LibraryThing assigns separate colors, making it easy to see at a glance how the thing is going.

More to do. This is just a first step. The “distinct authors” feature has to “go” all sorts of places on the site. First up will be separate pages for distinct authors–and a “disambiguation page” (a la Wikipedia) tying them together. Once that’s done we can move to separate author metadata, such as Common Knowledge, bettween distinct authors.

Quite frankly, I’m going to do a few more things and then let this sit for a while. My main focus right now—and Chris’—is to see “collections” to the finish line. When I realized I could bang out the first phase of distinct authors in a long evening (it’s after 5am now), I went ahead and did it. But now I need to refocus on collections.

Talk about it. I’ve set up a New features post to discuss the change, and its potential rammifications. I suspect that the Combiners! group will get in on the act quickly as well, working out various technical issues. They have a number of threads (here, here and here, at least), in which members have made lists of “identically named authors.” They would be a good starting-point.


*The hits are, of course, carried out by OCLC.

Labels: distinct authors, new feature, new features

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

Member Giveaways: Early Reviewers for everyone

We’ve just introduced a major new feature: Member Giveaway, a simple but flexible way for authors to get review copies into readers’ hands, and other members to clean out their attics!

Member Giveaway is built on top of our Early Reviewers program, which invites publishers to send LibraryThing members pre-publication copies of upcoming books. It has been a huge success, often giving out more than 1,500 books per month. But Early Reviewers has strict rules on participating, quantity and release dates, to keep up quality and encourage publishers to send out as many copies as they could spare.

Member Giveaway differs from Early Reviewers in a couple of ways:

  • Any LibraryThing member can participate.
  • There are no quantity restrictions. You can post a single book or a hundred.
  • Books do not need to be pre-release or even new.
  • Members are encouraged to review Giveaway books, but not reviewing them cannot hurt you.
  • Giveaway selection is random, not based on a similar-books algorithm. To discourage sockpuppetry, requesting members must have cataloged at least fifty books or be a premium (ie., paid) member.
  • Early Reviewers has a bird, but Member Giveaways uses squirrels. As you know, squirrels are lovely, sociable animals who share books readily.

Some other fun details:

  • If you’ve signed up for Early Reviewers, you are ready for Member Giveaways. The two programs have the same sign-up.
  • When you post a book you have a lot of options, including length of time it will last and where you’re willing to send it.
  • The sending member is responsible for all shipping. If you request and receive a book, the sending member will get your shipping address.

We made Member Giveaway for authors who couldn’t get their publisher to sign on to Early Reviewers, couldn’t get enough copies together or whose book was already out. (Early Reviewers also does not allow most self-published works, which has angered a few members, but both publishers and members reacted strongly when we included self-published books before.)

Publishers and authors aside we wanted to give regular members a chance to send good books to good homes. We have long pondered whether LibraryThing should enable book-swaps. But our friends at BookMooch do that so well already, and swapping is very hard to get right. But many members still wanted a simple way to get their old books to new homes. So, we set up a system to do that too.

We’ve started Member Giveaways off with seven great books.

Cancer is a Bitch and Beef were offered by my friend Larry Weissman, literary agent to both authors.

Released this Fall, both have already drawn great reviews from LibraryThing members and others. LibraryThing member skrishna wrote of Cancer Is a Bitch: “It’s funny, witty, sarcastic and will have you laughing out loud. Read this book. That’s all I really have left to say.” Of Beef, a microhistory in the tradition of Salt, the Boston Globe praised its “bovine evolution is riveting stuff.” Eats.com called it an “eloquent, poignant and influential account of man’s historical relationship with the cow.”

The other five books all come from a single member, keigu, Robin D. Gill, of Paraverse Press, which promises bilingual books “at a monolingual price.”

The books consist of Japanese text and English translations of hundreds or thousands of short Japanese poems—haiku and senryu on various topics. The publisher, who is also the author, sent LibraryThing a huge box some time ago, in anticipation of such a program. Abby and I, custodians of the books for so long never got around to reading them, but we will sorely miss people’s reactions at finding tall stacks of The Woman Without a Hole and Rise Ye, Sea Slugs!.

Three cheers for Mike! Memeber Giveaways was developed by Mike Bannister (LTMike) after I rather blithly tossed out the idea of opening Early Reviewers to everyone on a separate page. It took a while, but i is a beautiful, and solid piece of code.

Its completion frees Mike up to concentrate on Facebook full time, while Chris and me (but my programming time is somewhat hobbled by everythin else I do) continue work on collections.

Come talk about it here.

Labels: early reviewers, new feature, new features

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

Twitter your books to LibraryThing

We’ve added integration with Twitter, the popular SMS/microblogging site. Basically, it’s an easy way to add a book to your LibraryThing while standing in a bookstore, library or friend’s house.

Go to the new Edit your profile: Sites page to add your username. Once you follow LThing, you can direct message at any time to add a book to your library.

Example:
D LThing [ISBN or Title] #tag1, #tag2, etc.

Add my wife’s novel, Every Visible Thing with the tag “wishlist”:
D LThing 0066212898 #wishlist

Add Huckleberry Finn:
D LThing Huckleberry Finn

Search always goes off Amazon for now. It picks the first edition if you don’t specify.

Coming soon: We’ll be integrating deeper soon, so you can let your Twitter friends know when you add or review books on LibraryThing.

Follow us: The LThing account will only be used to send out Twitter/LibraryThing messages. If you want to follow what I’m doing my Twitter account is LibraryThingTim.

Labels: new feature, new features, twitter

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

Brains! Brains!

New Feature. I just released a minor feature, a new meme “Dead or Alive?” which breaks down your LibraryThing authors by whether they’re dead, alive or unknown. Check out mine or go to your profile and select “Memes” to find yours.

The information is based on the various authors’ birth and death dates in Common Knowledge. It works pretty much as you suspect. People with death dates are dead. People with birth dates only are alive, unless they’d be over 100. The rest are unknown. The system tracks when you use it, so I can add some statistics on whether your authors are more or less dead than others’ authors.

UPDATE: For clarity, you can change authors by going to their author page and editing in a birth or death date. For now, organizations are identified by being of the gender “n/a.”

New Books. I need no segue to mention two books I recently discovered. The first is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies from Chronicle Books, due out in April. According to the description:

“Pride and Prejudice and Zombies — Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen’s classic novel to new legions of fans.”

It’s an amusing idea. Taking on classics from a different vantage point has been done many times—think Wide Sargasso Sea, whose heroine is the “madwoman in the attic” of Jane Eyre. Others have have done prequels and sequels to famous works; at a low-point of my youth I read the entirety of Heathcliff—The return to Wuthering Heights. But has anyone taken the full text of a classic and inserted scenes of an entirely different character? The possibilities are endless. It’s the tragic story of star-crossed lovers set against the backdrop of 16th-century Verona—and an alien invasion! (Working title: Romeo and Juliet and Aliens).*

Another good titles is Jailbait Zombie by Mario Acevedo, picked up by Sonya at the recent American Library Association meeting in Denver. According to Sonya’s friend, another zombie-lover (but not literally), Zombie Jailbait “isn’t as good as the author’s Undead Kama Sutra,” an assessment that brings into high relief the problem with comparatives.


* I’m looking for other good titles. There is, of course, the moving story of two parents locked in a tragic custody battle over their young son—and stalked by a killer from another planet (Kramer versus Kramer versus Predator), but the movie is better known than the book.

UPDATE: A commentor points out All the World’s a Grave by John Reed, piecing together Shakespearian lines into a new play. The granddaddy is Pingres of Halicarnassus’ lost reworking of the Iliad, inserting a pentameter of his own creation between Homer’s hexameters (here). Those aren’t quite what I’m talking about.

Hat-tip to Lux Mentis for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Labels: humor, new feature, new features, zombies

Monday, January 12th, 2009

New home page

We’ve been working on a new home page. Here’s our latest version, largely Alana‘s work.

Right now some users get it and some don’t. You can force it to show the new one or the old one.

Come talk about it here.

I shouldn’t forget to mention that members debated earlier mockups extensively (392 messages!). Wow. Kudos to Alana for keeping her cool in the face of a hundred-headed critic!

Labels: design, new features

Friday, January 9th, 2009

Will you like it?

I added something I’ve been working off-and-on for about a year*: “Will you like it?” Here’s an example, correctly predicting that I will like Nabokov’s King, Queen, Knave:

You’ll find the section on work pages.

Because it requires a lot of processing, you have to click to get the result. Here it is, correctly predicting that I would not enjoy a popular book about Knitting:

Each assessment has a “certainty” score (eg., “high,” “low,” etc.) based largely on how popular the book is. You can see the raw scores by hovering over the downward arrow.

How good is it? Meh. It’sokay.

This is a devilishly hard algorithm to get right. I have some ideas for improvement, but it’s fundamentally a lark and a conversation piece at present, so I don’t want to waste too much time on it.

How it works. In case you’re interested, it works completely apart from our book-to-book recommendation system, or the system that aggregates those recommendations into member-specific lists of 1,000 recommended books. Instead, “Will you like it?” works directly from the data, examining the users who have a book and how their books relate to yours.

As such, it isn’t very good at sussing out where your tastes differ from those of people who share your books. For example, my large collection of books on Greek history match me up with people who enjoy other ancient history, but I am not that interested in early Republican Rome, no matter what the algorithm thinks.

What’s interesting? I’m not going to claim it’s perfect, but it’s interesting that, to my knowledge, nobody’s every tried this before.

I think this is yet another case of Amazon limiting the horizons of what people imagine online, particularly in the online book world. Amazon pioneered book-to-book and user-to-book reviews. The work was groundbreaking but it was also routed in commercial success. User-to-book recommendations drive customers to books they’ll like and book-to-book recommendations help them find the perfect book, as well as increase the number of items in each order. Giving people honest assessments of whether they’ll like a book is murkier. Does Amazon want to tell a customer they won’t enjoy something? And what if they’re wrong?

Meanwhile, LibraryThing succeeds by being fun and interesting, not by selling books. It gives us a rare freedom to invent features that don’t sell books, like our Unsuggester—what books will you hate?—and now this.

I started a topic to discuss it.


*Don’t worry. This didn’t distract. I just pushed two combination/separation bug fixes, and Chris and I are hard at work on the catalog, in preparation for some larger changes (ETA: one week?).

Labels: amazon, new features, recommendations

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

Common Knowledge: Names, Relationships and Events

Chris and I have introduced four new Common Knowledge fields, for authors and works.

Author Names. LibraryThing’s author system is personally libertarian and globally democratic. You can change your own author names to your heart’s delight. On the global level author names are combined and separated by members, with the most common name ending up on top.

That system has two main problems. First, Library has no good method for separatin out homonymous authors. (It’s a big problem; it’s on our list.) And most-common logic has its limitations, particularly in picking the best name for an author and in laying out what the many variants mean.

To improve things we’ve added a number of optional name fields. “Canonical name” was already there, as a foolproof way to set the “most common” form. To this we’ve added “Legal name” and “Other names.”

“Legal Name” is provided for users who want to record the most accurate, most fiddly form of a name, eg., “George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron.” It can hold multiple names, to capture given names, and so forth.* “Other names” is for pen names, aliases, stage names, etc.

Two examples should illustrate the differences nicely:

Canonical Name: Twain, Mark
Legal Name: Clemens, Samuel Langhorne
Other Names: Snodgrass, Quintus Curtius
Canonical Name: Rice, Anne
Legal Name: Rice, Howard Allan Frances O’Brien
O’Brien, Howard Allen (given)
Other Names: Rampling, Anne
Roquelaure, A. N.

Relationships. We’ve also added a “Relationships” field, intended to capture when an author’s spouse, son or other relative is also an author (eg., Martin Amis). So far at least, it’s only intended to capture author-to-author relations, creating author-page links. LibraryThing can’t be a all-out genealogy site!*

The result can be rather fun. Starting from Isabel Fonseca, author of Attachment you can now go to well-known British novelist Martin Amis, to his well-known father Kingsley Amis, to his second wife, the British novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, to her first huband Peter Scott, a popular naturalist whose father was Robert Falcon Scott (Scott of the Antarctic) and godfather Peter Pan author J. M. Barrie, great grandfather of Kevin Bacon (not true).

Events. We’ve also added an “Important Events” field to works. “Important Events” now follows “Persons” and “Important Places.” It was designed for events like the Great Fire of London, World War II or the 2000 Election.

As with Important Places, it is useful to agree on terms. CK’s autocomplete function helps there. When in doubt, however, I’d go with the Wikipedia form for both fields.


*Porn names not allowed.
**I’m not so sure about “friend” relationships, although that’s currently allowed. I found it difficult enough to reach an end from Isabel Fonseca. With friends, I don’t think I could have ever stopped.

Labels: authors, common knowledge, new features

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008

Quotations, Epigraphs and Blurbers

I’ve added three fields to Common Knowledge, fun fields that should keep the more obsessive of us busy for a while, and which move us somewhat closer to being the “IMDB of books”—quotations, epigraphs and blurbers.

Quotations. Members have been wanting a place to stick interesting or important quotations for some time, often keeping them in their quotations field.

There are, of course, sites devoted to literary quotes. But none can match their quotes against the books in your own library, giving you more incentive to add them. Together with first and last words, added recently, I foresee all manner of fun applications—guessing games blog widgets that cycle through quotes from your library, etc.

Example: The Stars my Destination (Tiger! Tiger!) by Alfred Bester

Epigraphs. Users asked for this to be separated from quotations.

Example: I am in an epigraph free-room. Help!

Blurbers. If you’re not in publishing, you may be unfamiliar with this term. A blurber is someone who blurbs your book, writing up a very short review for your publisher, who selects a sentence or two and puts it on the back cover. If/when your book goes into paperback or gets reprinted, the blurbs may be replaced by quotes from professional reviewers, or they may not.

Often labeled “Advanced Praise for” or something like that, blurbs are an essential part of the authorial economy, and not always a pretty part, as Rebecca Johnson wrote in Slate:

“So much of blurbing process is a corrupt quid pro quo. You praise my book; I’ll praise yours. In the ’80s, Spy magazine ran a monthly column on the very topic called ‘Log Rolling in Our Time.'”

I’m looking forward to seeing this information develop. It’s well known that blurb relationships are reciprocal, and that some people write blurbs for more books than–it seems–they could ever read.

Example: Hidden Iran by Ray Takeyh, with the ubiquitous Fareed Zakaria and Zbibniew Brzeznski.

Labels: blurbers, blurbs, new features, quotes

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

Cover page changes

I’ve revamped each work’s “covers” page—a.k.a. “change cover”—to emphasize the higher-quality images among out 1,000,000 covers.

1. The images are bigger, so you can see quality, and because covers are so beautiful.
2. The algorithm now sorts larger covers higher, so that members are more likely to pick higher-quality versions of their cover. The existing sort order was reinforcing the use of low-quality images, even when LT had high-quality ones.
3. High-quality images now say “high quality” and list the original dimensions.

Here are some examples: The Odyssey, Pnin, The Kama Sutra, Pudd’nhead Wilson, Origin of Species, Life of Pi, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Labels: book covers, covers, new features

Monday, August 11th, 2008

Series, Awards, Characters, Places

Some time ago we added pages for series. We’ve now added pages for three other Common Knowledge fields: Awards, Important Places and People/Characters.

All four page types, together with the author pages, now also sport extensive cross-linking, so you can get from Stephen King to the Bram Stoker Awards to Hannibal Lecter to the Marquis de Sade to Cornwall to Guenevere. (Bonus points if you can get back!)

Here are some observations on the various page types:

Awards. Awards are important to a lot of readers. Personally I have no use for them, but they’re fun to browse through. And there are so many! Sure, we’ve all heard of the British Book Awards or the Hugo. But how about the Compton Crook Award, Macavity Award or Printz Award?

Places. Some of the most interesting places are the small ones. Paris is already too much, and even Philadelphia. But Antarctica is small enough to take in, and large enough to be interesting. So too Martha’s Vineyard and Petra, Jordan (one part Left Behind, one part Indiana Jones and another academic).

But we need more for Faerie, Hell and particularly Moldova. As for Nuevo Rico, where are the Nuevo Ricans!

Speaking of odd, The Playboy Mansion is currently occupied by Shel Silverstein. What?

Series. Series pages aren’t new. But I might as well drop that series are the most complete, best Common Knowledge data. It’s not just Harry Potter, Star Wars or His Dark Materials, but also New American Nation, Time-Life: Mysteries of the Unknown and Hellenistic Culture and Society.

People/Characters. A lot of fun can be had here, particularly with characters that cross between fiction and non-fiction, like Lincoln and Alexander the Great and Pope Alexander VI. You will, of course, find familiar faces like Jack Aubrey, Gandalf and Sherlock Holmes.

Fun can be had with minor characters. Take Reepicheep from the Chronicles of Narnia. Can you remember which books he appears in? (It’s Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Last Battle; if you found that easy, how about Jill Pole?)

The “related” boxes can show up scarce data. For example, right now God is showing up related to 69 individuals. Jesus is number one, but he’s followed by Bernice Summerfield, apparently a character in Doctor Who. (Incidentally, Jesus is somewhat split between Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus Christ, etc.)

Post here or discuss on Talk.

Tim is gone! Incidentally, I am now on an official “code holiday.” I have at least three days without any obligations whatsoever, and I intend to stay in, order pizza, stop answering the door, stop answering the phone, stop writing on Talk, and even—gasp!—stop answering email. I may even put one of those “vacation auto-reply” messages up. After three days, I hope I have something.

Labels: awards, common knowledge, new features, series

Monday, August 11th, 2008

First and last words

“Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians.”

Recognize that sentence? It is, of course, from Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. How about?

“Now, what I want is, Facts.”

That’s from Dickens, Hard Times.

We just introduced new work-based Common Knowledge fields for “First words” and “Last words.” In the medium-to-long term, I’d love to work the data into a game—pick the sentence that goes with the work. If you’re not comparing computer manuals to novels, it can be hard.

Find out more here.

Labels: common knowledge, new features, quotes

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

Recently tagged gets sexier

Chris did some very elegant work, redoing the “recently tagged” section of tag pages.

The new version brings back the RSS feed, disabled for a time for performance reasons. But it also looks much better, and is more informative, using the code from the home page “Tag Watch.”

Some examples: European history, Star Wars, chick lit, steampunk.

Discuss.

Labels: new features, rss

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

Who has a book?

I’ve added a small section to work pages. The “Members” section shows who of your friends, interesting libraries and other connections have the work.

It also surveys the Legacy Libraries, a member project to catalog the libraries of famous dead people. So you can find out if Hemingway and Marie Antoinette owned, say, the Lusiads (Yes, they did). I think it gives this project—now growing quite impressive—a deserved boost

Discuss here.

Labels: connection news, new feature, new features

Saturday, June 21st, 2008

Member home pages

Chris and I have finished up a neat, possibly major new feature: home pages for each member. We think it’s going to make LibraryThing a lot more dynamic, while not compromising our strong basis and roots in unchecked, unapologetic bibliophilia.

I made a short screencast about it if, you know, reading gets you down.

The basic idea was to give members a “center” from which to visit the rest of the site. Until now, sign-in threw you into your catalog. New members went to a special welcome page. And the profile also felt like a center.

The new profile centers you. It offers pieces or “windows” into the site—your library, your connections, your recommendations, Talk, hot books, hot reviews, Early Reviewers and so forth. It gives you an idea of how much LibraryThing has to offer. But, it’s also editable, so you can control how much of each piece you want to see, and even remove the ones you don’t care about. (Anyway, that’s the theory. We haven’t implemented reordering and removing the pieces yet, because we want members to tell us what the defaults should be.)

You can check out your Home by going here. Or check out my Home. (Normally you can’t see other member’s Home pages, but you can see mine!)

Some highlights. Home includes a summary of recent recommendations, so you can keep up-to-date on what LibraryThing has found for you, as well as a very handy Connection news piece. You can decide just what you want to see—new books, ratings, reviews. And you can decide whose news you want to see.

I’m also very taken with the Local events piece, based on LibraryThing Local. It should give Local more prominence. It’s really a unique resource—driven by members and more comprehensive than anything out there.

In addition to the “Daily Me” stuff—news about you and your world—Home also provides snapshots of what’s happening on the rest of LibraryThing, including a totally new “Popular This Month” list (The Host, of course), a weirdly fascinating up-to-the-second window into books being added to LibraryThing, an area for interesting reviews, a new “On this day” feature that sucks birth- and death-days from Common Knowledge, a peek into the current Early Reviewers batch and some featured LT authors.

In the near future we plan to make the order of pieces editable. For now, though, we’d love some thoughts about the best default order. After all, most users will never change the default.

Other planned improvements include:

  • Making it the homepage for non-signed-in members too (ie., the right stays the way it is, but the left is taken over with a description of the site).
  • Adding specialized pieces, like a Combiners! log, a wiki log—whatever you want, in theory.

When it comes to making LT more “current,” the aching need, as everyone insists—Sonya has taken to closing every email with a plea—is for collections, particularly a “currently reading” feature. We know, and we’re working on it. The Home page isn’t complete without it.

Thanks for everyone’s help critiquing early drafts of the page. Come talk about what we made in Talk.

UPDATE: The first thread is pushing 250 messages in eight hours. It also got sidetracked into tab issues. (I relented; the Profile tab is back.) So I’ve started a New Thread about the Home page.

Labels: home, new features, screencasts