Interfacing books

22Nov06

One of the many ways in which I am a geek is my fascination with interfaces for accessing media and the material world. So I’ve been in geek-heaven since Kathleen pointed me toward LibraryThing via the MediaCommons blog. LibraryThing is a social high-tech interface to the less-social low-tech world of people’s collection of books – you create an account, start entering in books that you own/want/read/etc., and tag them by subject, keyword, opinion, whatever makes sense to you. As you start building up your entries, you can find people with similar tastes in books, ask LibraryThing to recommend similar titles, browse via tags, and all sorts of other fun ways to wander your way through book collections that could never work via old interfaces of shelves & LOC cataloguing. I can even have a random selection from my library appear on my blog (look on the left margin Critique of Pure Reason, you will not like Confessions of a Shopaholic!” How true, how true…

I have little insightful to say about the site, except to encourage people to use it – as with all Web 2.0 apps, they become exponentially more powerful as more use it. So if you’ve got books, sign up!

Filed under: Not Quite TV   |  Leave a Comment