Lofbomm.com

I can’t believe that I’m just now finding out about this. LibraryThing is a way cool web service/community/social networking thingie for geeky bibliophiles. If you know me, you know that I no doubt qualify. I found it on a site called MoMB that my buddy Daniel turned me on to, that lists the newest and hottest 100 Web 2.0 sites on the scene.

A quick aside: For those of you who asked me what Web 2.0 means in response to my last post - As I understand it, it basically refers to a internet paradigm shift from static and owner-created web content, toward more dynamic and user/community created content. Web 1.0…think checking the weather forecast, or reading an article in the New York Times. Web 2.0…think dynamic content driven web apps like GoogleCalendar or Netvibes and user/community driven content of MySpace, YouTube, and Wikipedia, or my personal favorites, Flickr and del.icio.us.

(If you’re still confused, a nice, extensive treatment of Web 2.0 from tech guru Tim O’Reilly can be found over here.)

Anyway, I’m just loving LibraryThing. It’s a mash-up of several things I really enjoy: books, thinking about books, looking at my books, talking about books, meeting people who like the same books I do, and leveraging internet technology to engage in our real-life passions and interests in new, dynamic and global ways.

Adding books is as simple as looking for a book on Amazon, since LibraryThing is actually tied in with the search englines of Amazon & The Library of Congress. Once you find your book, you can choose to edit or add information, such as date purchased, date started & finished reading, and so on.

You can tag your books by topics covered and then see which topics define the nature of your collection by displaying your ‘tag-cloud’ (some pretty strong themes emerging in our still small library here in Korea, as you can see in our tag-cloud below). You can also use these tags to see what other user’s books share the same tags.

Other users with similar interests can be found in the topical Groups and Talk sections, and in the Zeitgeist section, you can get your fill of statistics to pull out at parties such as top 75 authors, top 25 books, 50 largest libraries, 50 lowest-rated authors and so on.

There’s even a book swap option built in, which is tied-in with swapping communities that have appeared recently, such as BookMooch and Bookins. I don’t suppose that option would work out so economically from the other side of the world!

I think this would also be a great way for friends to see what the other is reading or what may be collecting dust on the shelf that they might borrow. They make this part really easy by offering the javascript widgets like you’ll find on our Welcome and Connexions pages.

In short, I think LibraryThing is a well thought out technology for bringing freshness into an old relationship for people who really love books. Feel free to visit my library and let me know if you end up using and enjoying LibraryThing as well!

—A.