I can't believe it's taken me all this time to discover LibraryThing. It's simply an amazing... well, thing. PC Magazine says...

LibraryThing is a social network of bibliophiles. That's right. Bibliophiles. Despite its reputation as a frivolous fad among teenagers and twentysomethings, online social networking has the power to serve almost anyone -- including people with a passion for books.

I wasn't aware that social networking was widely thought to be reserved to da youts, but let us pass over that in silence. Continuing...

Created by Chicagoan Tim Spaulding, this grass-roots site follows in the footsteps of Flickr and del.icio.us. Just as Flickr built an online community around digital photos and del.icio.us fashioned a similar social network around browser "favorites," LibraryThing connects people through their book collections.

And oh boy, does it ever. I just uploaded 700 ISBNs for books I've been raving about (in one sense or another) over on Mystic Bourgeoisie. Take a look at the "author cloud" that produced! And each of those author links connects to other people who own the same books by said author, and/or reviews of said books, and so on. The "so on" part is extremely extensive. Here, trip around in this eclectic headspace for a while!

Highbeam finds 21 hits on LibraryThing, including this...

LibraryThing lets you create an online database of your book collection, automatically entering details about the books (from Amazon.com and the Library of Congress) when you enter a title. You also can "tag" books on your list to make them searchable by whatever categories you like, rate and review them and share your handiwork with other book lovers.

OK, so that doesn't tell you much more than you already knew. However, the writer mentions another site I'd never heard of.

Ms. Dewey is not your father's librarian. Unless your father's librarian was a super model, and even then your father's librarian wasn't computer generated. I'm not sure this attempt to make search sexy is worth the overhead, but it's interesting to try and the results seem to be good, if a little slow to arrive. For fun, type in "Janina Gavankar."

from: Links Column
source: The News-Gazette, 13 November 2006
via: HighBeam™ Research

I tried the "Janina Gavankar" search, and the results were astounding -- until I realized (duh!) that it's a canned example. For even more fun, type in "Chief Blogging Officer" -- talk about your strange loops and twisty little passages!

One word of warning. Ms. Dewey gets to be a pain real quick. If you tab away to do something else, she knocks, sighs breathily and hassles you to come back. Funny the first time. Annoying thereafter.