phyllostachys sixteen: LibraryThing.com

My journey was quite typical for me: starting at news.google.com, I linked to the science pages, on which I found a link to a company doing quantum computing. So, I next googled the company's website, read through the main page - the company is really building a quantum computer...if ever there was a push to Verner Vinge's Singularity, this has got to be it! ;-)

About half way down the page there's a link that reads "D-Wave, in the Founder's Words" -- "Dr. Geordie Rose speaks out on a wide range of topics, including the media myths and misconceptions about quantum computing." Interestingly, you don't see many links on a company's website that link off to another location, so this must be interesting.

Personal blog pages are becoming something of a resume on the web, but I've never seen a link to a person's favorite list of books. Dr. Rose had a link that said, under the heading "Geordie's Books", there was a link to something called "My LibraryThing". I mean, books are sooooo 19th century, aren't they??? Intrigued (as I am about books generally, anyways), I linked on over to this strange term labelled "LibraryThing".

Linking, hypertextually across the web, is how I learn many new things. That's why I love using finance.yahoo.com - there are so many great tidbits of information...and so many links to new and different ways of organizing all that information. With Googles' new News search utility, I don't need a "news aggregator" separate from news.google.com...it is my news aggregator. I look through the top news section, link over to Business, or Science, and if I don't see anything interesting, I type in a search term, such as "Apple", after which you'll see all sorts of news (or blog posts, linked to at the bottom) about the iPhone, Cisco's friendly battle about tradenames...and sometimes something like "there's a bad apple in every workplace", a sociological piece about working with others.

So, imagine my surprise, not knowing what to expect, when LibraryThing turns out to be a way for people to list the books they own, and do reviews on some or all of those books. Okay, that's simple. My spouse uses something call Readerware, where you can scan in the ISBN bar code, and Readerware will link out to some web site and download the entire meta information, as well as recent sale prices. Naturally, if you're posting your books on the web, you want to sell them, right?

Not so at LibraryThing. This, as it turns out, is a social website, one of the new breed of internet sites, a la Myspace, Facebook, Blogger, etc. Once you've entered in a book, either by ISBN, Library of Congress number, or just a portion of the title, you're presented first with a list of matching titles -- there may be different editions, publish dates, types of media (book, audio, dvd), or people may have entered the title information differently. Once you click on a title that looks correct....it pops into your list of recently added titles. Then LibraryThing's internal programming takes over, and on your profile page you see lists of other LibraryThing users who similarly have the same books as you do in their personal library. Now, on the surface, that's just interesting. But...thinking socially, if someone collects (and presumably) reads books similar to your own, perhaps there are other similarities. Do you see where this is going? Myspace is the place for kids and restaurants and young adults to post their favorite bands, favorite clothes, favorite shopping malls, etc., thereby linking to others on similar social interests. But LibraryThing actually may show, specifically if the person has started reviewing books, beyond the actual, but sadly frequent one-liners: Ice Towers by Duncan McGeary "It certainly isn't any better to be in Icetowers compared to Snowcastles", something about the person he or she wouldn't ordinarily reveal - this same type of revelation is sought by many readers in the writing by some authors, such as the reporter-shy Thomas Pynchon. (The Icetowers was reviewed by "bluetyson", an Australian LTer who has actually reviewed some 3100 books, so perhaps the periodic one-liner can be forgiven in this case.)

Somehow, after surfing about in LibraryThing for the better part of an evening, I came across the page of LyriqueTragedy. This name was interesting to me, in part because of my classical Greek undergraduate degree, and the obligatory studies of Oedipus Tyrannus (Oἰδίπoυς τύραννoς), etc. The voice behind LyriqueTragedy is a university lecturer, a reviewer of books (not only in LibraryThing, but also via Blogger posts and LiveJournal entries), and an aspiring writer. Here's where the beauty of the web as a communications medium shines through: after a week of communication, LyriqueTragedy may be willing to produce a netcast (podcast) with me, which is potentially to be called "Minute Lit". I've already produced episode 1 with this description:

"Minute Lit - the netcast for reading and discussing the single and assembled words of literature -- Episode zero-zero-one"

My next part of the process is to design, with LyriqueTragedy, a few more episodes, and figure out how to produce it to the web. The direct source of my Podcast fever, as mentioned in my previuos post, is PodCamp Pittsburgh. If you can put together interesting content, you'll draw interested listeners.


bye for now.

..phyllostachys.

(update: I figured out how to post this netcast to the web. Apple's ".mac" makes this very easy!)