DISQUS

It's a funny phenomenon. In general my criticism of Mashable and other such blogs is that they cover West Coast startups rather than larger trends or of other, more successful companies. So, Mashable talks endlessly about Shelfari and not about (my company) LibraryThing. Having almost three times the traffic doesn't matter if you're headquartered in Maine and nobody in San Fransisco has a dime in you.

So the Twitter obsession is peculiar. Twitter is an interesting tech story, but it's not of major economic significance. If West-Coast VCs are piling into Twitter apps because Mashable keeps talking about them, maybe some justice will come out of it.

But if this is all about making Mashable more about trends and less about deals, more power to you!

What are you reading now, then? Of course, it still includes MY blog, right? ;)

See also Listphile, ListsofBests, Listology... It's been tried a lot.

The main problem is, I think, that nobody gets up in the morning wanting to make "lists." Lists aren't an *interest*, they're a *genre* of interest.

People do make lists, but it happens in some definite interest-based social context. (People make tons of lists on my site, LibraryThing, but they're about books, and even there it's not general lists, but lists taking place within an interest group.) I could see a big list site growing out of a niche site--a site devoted to sci-fi might have a list section that grows into something bigger as the sci-fi people get comfortable with each other and want to know what the best fantasy novels are. Or maybe a list site could start by externalizing their technology, so you could add list-making functionality to your blog or niche site easily.

But a stand-alone site devoted to lists... I just don't see it working.

Correction: 40%

Correction: There's no way in Hell Shelfari is making more than, say, $50,000/year from Amazon referrals. At 5% that would require about $1,000,0000 books sold. I think they have ten employees. The math is impossible. We make less and are larger. They are trying to make it work on advertising—which I also doubt, but in any case LibraryThing has none.

A couple thoughts:

1. I didn't mean to go after all libraries. I can very much understand why public libraries don't have the time to wade through the dregs of publishing. But some good stuff has and will emerge from places like Lulu, and at least their jobbers should be aware of them.
2. Tech books are a problem. Quite frankly, they're starting to matter less and less. I still swear by my O'Reilly's but I'm a book guy. The young programmers I've hired don't use books. I hope this is an edge issue, not a case of the future being unevenly distributed, as the saying goes.

Check out what I get for Books at Eventful.

http://eventful.com/events?within_units=100+km&...

There's certainly a lot, but hockey games and belly dancing isn't what I'm looking for in a book event. Apart from that, they're mostly picking up the Borders feed. We could do it too, but it's mostly story-times, not author readings.

Still you're right we should suggest that LibraryThing members pick up events from Eventful too.

Hey Nicole. More coming in that direction. We're in the middle of a conversation—about 500 messages worth!—about how to improve this. It's an absolute goldmine of tags vs. categories discussion :)

Hey, when's Koha going to add our tags, eh?

There's no question catalogers work for users. But, as Niole said, nobody goes back to add the subjects. The great flowering of chick lit in the late 90s will never get the tag; it was a commonly-used term for at least seven years before the LC added it. The same pattern can be seen in subjets like Sociobiology, Memetics and many others.

As for Cyberpunk, the only subject is Cyberpunk Culture, applied to exactly one work in the history of the LC. I'm not sure whether that's better or worse than never using it at all.

Only a Californian would describe Ohio as being in the "Northeast"! Please, that's Flyover Country...

I'm so pleased this example is spreading.

LibraryThing is going to release a new "tagmash" feature soon, creating pages—not searches—combining tags.

So, "Greek" and "history." This can be better than the lesser pile of things tagged "greek history," and really comes into its own with something like "france + wwii + memoirs" or "japan + love - fiction." I haven't "opened" it yet, however, because I wanted to add two things (1) weighting of factors, and (2) adding subjects and pieces of subjects too—"france + wwii + subject:congresses" or "subject:Nervous system--Wounds and injuries + tag:mountaineering." The system naturally computes "relatedness" to "single" subjects, tags and to other tagmashes.

The goal is to create something between the fluidity of the tag and the fixity of the subject—a fixed criterion for a fluid list—a fluid LCSH, a dynamic playlist, Listmania will legs!

Still thinking it through...

Let's not forget Gurulib.com, Douban.com, ShelfCentered.com, Anobii.com, Lib.rario.us, Socialogue.com, BooksWellRead.com, Reader2.com, Bibliophil.org, BooksWeLove.com, MediaChest.com, Stuffopolis.com, BookAndReader.com, Squirl.info, iTaggit.com, ChainReading.com, BookJetty.com, ConnectViaBooks.com, Reliwa.de, Buchpfade.de, , Dejaboo.com, Booklog.jp, Pitecan and Bokhyllan.com.

Vote: LibraryThing, if I can vote my myself. If not, Wordie.

Why not have a social cataloging category? Listal isn't a "niche" site, is it? Which is more a niche—"movies, books, games, music and tv," "mobile" or "sports"?

Flixster is cool, but five million? No way. Take a look at LibraryThing and Flixster in Alexa up to the date of this article. They go up and down differently, but they're basically the same—the space under the line is the same. Then do Google Blox Search—LibraryThing has 15 times as many mentions!

So how did LibraryThing have 100,000 users, and Flixster 50 times as many? Are LibraryThing users 50 times as likely to have the Alexa toolbar. Is there a conspiracy of silence on blogs? The numbers just don't add up.

Hey, thanks again for the opportunity. A quick note, if I might. Although Amazon could make a full-fledged clone—as could anyone; LibraryThing has 22 competitors!—we're not in competition now. The Amazon-owned site AllConsuming overlaps in theory—you can list your books there—but the emphasis and audience is all different. AllConsuming is young and more like Amazon—multimedia and with broad appeal—not like LibraryThing with its hard-core bibliophiles. On recommendations, Amazon don't market them to libraries, who are often tenative about Amazon's commercial bent anyway. LibraryThing is, of course, an Amazon Affiliate, so we're actually making money off each other now.

There's features and features. Shelfari doesn't connect to anything other than Amazon.com. That's great if all your books are still in print, and are in English. If not, you're out of luck. If it works for you now, you better upload your books now, before they go out of print.

Editing your data is also another "feature," I'd argue is necessary. And it's odd to see a "social site" where the only way to contact people is through comments--no groups, no forums, etc.

Lastly, how Web 2.0 is Shelfari's Terms of Use? They assert not only a license over the content you give them--reviews, tags, etc.--but actually *copyright*. Even Amazon doesn't claim copyright over their reviews!