Thing Fourteen: LibraryThing

In case y'all didn't notice: I added my LibraryThing widget a long time ago. There are few things more pleasurable than finding out what others have read. LibraryThing is a delightful site. I love the options of knowing what other people have read based on the similarities of their libraries to yours. I love the "more recommendations" and the(brilliant) "anti-recommendations." Seriously, choosing the hot links to either of these categories after you have found a particular book leads you to all sorts of intriguing titles. So many people are a part of LibraryThing that I think it works really well. Millions of books are represented.
And the tagging! I cannot tell you how many times I have used LibraryThing to find a book that I was unable to remember the title to. More often than not I have located seemingly un-locatable books. I think that alone is a good reason to be familiar with LibraryThing. I think it would be great to have LibraryThing integrated into our catalog. From what I gather it is a simple thing to do.
I also belong to Goodreads. Not so many people contribute, so I don't think it's as great as LibraryThing. But check it out, it has a nice feel to it also.

Thing Eleven: Social Bookmarking

The fun thing about doing 23Things is that I realize I'm not as behind the curve as I thought I was. I use a lot more of the web 2.0 things than I think. What I'm realizing is that these technologies should be integrated to do more easily what you were already going to do. I don't think it's necessary to try to invent uses for things that seem, well, time consuming or frivolous. I mean, it's cool to know that there are all those photo manipulator APIs out there, and I know that so many people use them a lot, but I will rarely, if ever, have much use for them. Some of the people I've talked to at the library about the 23Things project seem to feel put upon or resentful of having to do this, and I think that's fine. If their job is going the way they want and they are able to do what they need to do without web 2.0, cool. For myself this opens doors to the possibilities and gives me a library context; for that I am grateful. I do, however, think that all this signing up for accounts is intrusive. Who knows who is aggregating information about me? Following a digital/online trail is easy. I've been able to find out first and last names of people using nom de webs (not on purpose) just by following links to their various accounts. Not that they are necessarily trying to hide their identities, it's just that sometimes you don't realize how social social networking is. For some things I've set up accounts that I had originally believed would be used solely for myself. Now when I've come to want to link to them, I've been having some hard times trying to change screen names etc. Not to mention that many sites recognize my computer. I don't think it's going too far to be wary of these things, especially when we find that our government authorized illegal telephone taps. God knows who cares or why, I just want the freedom of anonymity...

Anyway, I have been using del.icio.us for a couple of years now, and I love it. I'm not really interested in the "social" part of it, but I really like being able to save online articles and blog entries etc. without having to cram the bookmark feature on my computer. Plus, the tagging makes them far more easily retrievable. I don't know how much I'd use del.icio.us for research, I guess it would depend on the topic. Like Wikipedia, del.icio.us might be a good way to start research and find primary sources.

I think tags are so unbelievably useful. Sure, there are always the too general tags, but in so many ways tags enable searches using regular language. I like that. And I like looking at tag clouds.

One thing that I've had a problem with is posting favorite articles to del.icio.us from a computer that is not mine. It seems that no matter what you must download the bookmarklet to be able to add favorites to your account. Regardless of if they (the bookmarklets) are removable, I think I should merely have to capture a URL to add it. I don't want to always have to add things to computers that are not mine. I just thought that was weird, I couldn't believe that it wasn't as easy as I thought it should be. Otherwise, I really like del.icio.us. I do not, however, enjoy having to type it.