Re: ACTION: paulmiller to look at librarything

Typical!  :-)

All the links seem to be working now.

The site *is* a beta, but looking at http://www.librarything.com/users.php
suggests it's a pretty popular one... 116,000 users cataloguing almost 8
million books in just over a year.

On your specific point about searching by date, I don't see that option at
http://www.librarything.com/search.php; it could be worth suggesting,
though!

To my knowledge, there isn't an easy way to *extract* data for mashing with
other sources, although we have seen examples of data being pulled *in* from
other places (my [6]). We are having a conversation with the creator about
exactly that, though...


On 12/12/06 13:38, Ivan Herman wrote:

> Hi Paul,
> 
> I began to play with this. I created a user 'ivan_herman' and added four
> books to test with. But, somehow, it still smells quite 'beta' to me,
> althought it might be a good service indeed.
> 
> For example, I tried to use your [2] click below. All I got is what
> seems to be a SQL dump rather than a list of real books. Also, I do not
> see my user id appearing among the ones who use this tag (although that
> is what I tried to use). I also tried
> 
> http://www.librarything.com/tag/semantic%20web
> 
> which seems to be the same...
> 
> [3] crashes:-(
> 
> It is therefore difficult to see how useful this is (but I will try
> again, after all, beta is beta!).
> 
> Another question: is it possible to search the books by the years? I saw
> the authors but, in our case, a bunch of books are edited by people,
> which is hardly relevant; if I want to find, say, ISWC2003, I would
> prefer to go for the year...
> 
> Also: it would be good if the data could somehow be mashed up with other
> data, like the RDF data provided by Chris Bizer (see the wiki page on
> books). Is there an RSS feed for a page like [1]? That could be a start
> 
> I am happy to continue playing with this for a while, though
> 
> Ivan
> 
> Paul Miller wrote:
>> There was an action on me from last week to take a look at the suitability
>> of LibraryThing [1] as one channel by which to push out information about
>> Semantic Web books, etc.
>> 
>> Taking a quick look, [2] 16 people currently tag 18 books [3] as being in
>> some way related to the topic.
>> 
>> In each case, you can view descriptions of the book, find various ways to
>> get hold of it by buying or borrowing it, or look at related and recommended
>> works.
>> 
>> Given the number of people claiming to own any one of these titles, the
>> really valuable network effects are not kicking in fully. However, if 'the
>> community' were encouraged to embrace this as a way of increasing awareness
>> and understanding then it could certainly serve as one useful tool amongst
>> many in our toolkit.
>> 
>> Give it a try for yourself, maybe recording a couple of titles that *you*
>> own; registration is free, and you can catalogue up to 200 books for free as
>> well.
>> 
>> See something like [4] or [5] for examples of the possibilities once the
>> crowd gets wise...
>> 
>> See also [6] for one way in which a colleague of mine has been able to
>> further enhance the display...
>> 
>> [1] - http://www.librarything.com/
>> [2] - http://www.librarything.com/tag/semantic+web
>> [3] - http://www.librarything.com/tag_allbooks.php?tag=semantic%20web
>> [4] - http://www.librarything.com/work/16738
>> [5] - http://www.librarything.com/work/11754
>> [6] - http://www.talis.com/tdn/greasemonkey/librarythingthing
>> 

-- 
Dr Paul Miller
Senior Manager & Technology Evangelist, Talis
w: www.talis.com/       m: +44 (7769) 740083
im: talis_paul@mac.com [AIM, MSN and iChat]
skype: napm1971
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Received on Tuesday, 12 December 2006 14:59:47 UTC