At 12:50 AM 6/22/2006, you wrote:
>On 6/22/06, Tim Spalding <tim_at_librarything.com> wrote:
>>The second--and more interesting--is that books are POWERFULLY social.
>>They are important social markers—people self- and other-identify
>>based upon what books they read. And they are powerful social
>>connectors. People love to talk about their books.
>
>Hmm, have you got your target group pinned down? Because I don't love
>to talk about my books (frankly, not many would be that interested in
>my books), but I'd love to talk about my movies and my music. And
>maybe I'm swearing in church, but I feel the demographic for music and
>movies is quite larger than books. Why are we even limiting ourselfs
>to specific types of objects? Why not go and make ThingsThing?
>
>In other words, who are your users? Sure, I've got a LibraryThing
>account, it was fun at first, but then what? Now what? What does it do
>for me? I would love more info on rare books on baroque music, but
>such things mostly do not exsist in a popularity-driven context such
>as LibraryThing. I don't think I'm unique in this respect either.
When I first started using LibraryThing, my goals
were to inventory my books while packing them for
a move, and export the data to a FileMaker
database on my Palm that helps me avoid the
purchase of duplicate books. I kept my catalog private.
Then I started exploring. I found friends'
catalogs. I browsed catalog of people who had
interesting looking collections. I started
visiting the author pages and contributing to the
effort of grouping manifestations into
works. After deciding to make my catalog public,
I've heard from complete strangers who share my
interest in some obscure authors, one of whom --
a professor in Japan -- send me an interesting
link about a project to geo-annotate works by an
early twentieth century American author and
record and map the locations using Google Maps.
I'm a fan of LibraryThing.
>Put differently; I'd love to use some of the facilities and ideas in
>LT, but right now I too wonder why people use it.
>
>
>Alex
>--
>"Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know."
> - Frank Herbert
>__ http://shelter.nu/ __________________________________________________
------------
Leslie Johnston
Head, Digital Access Services
University of Virginia Library
http://lib.virginia.edu/digital/
http://lib.virginia.edu/digital/das/
johnston_at_virginia.edu
Received on Thu Jun 22 2006 - 13:35:34 EDT