Re: ACTION: paulmiller to look at librarything

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
> 

-- 

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
URL: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
PGP Key: http://www.cwi.nl/%7Eivan/AboutMe/pgpkey.html
FOAF: http://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf.rdf