LibraryThing

Having just repainted my living room and freshly restocked the bookshelves, I knew the "first row" had some great stuff. I pulled a stack and went to the computer. The easiest signup ever gave me my LibraryThing account, and then it's time to add books.

First up, "American Scenery" from 1840. This has sentimental value. LibraryThing finds it at the Library of Congress. No cover art, which makes sense because it was published as a serial. NYPL has it in their digital library. I did some scans for a school project that are better than the NYPL scans I looked at - "Lake Winnipisseogee, from Red Hill is my one of my favorites.

Next up, "The Book of the Tarpon". I love this book, with its many early photos of tarpon fishing. I run into a little problem with LibraryThing; it doesn't show edition or publication date when it finds multiple instances at Library of Congress. It shows a field as "(date?)" when in fact the metadata does have dates. I find my 1911 edition by picking both and drilling down. Could be better.

On my next book, "A Geographical View of the World Embracing the Manners, Customs and Pursuits, of Every Nation", I strike out completely. It's a pretty rare title, I guess, since it's not at Library of Congress or in WorldCat or in LT. Still, AbeBooks has four copies for sale. I don't see a way to use AbeBooks for book discovery. Once you have a found item you can look it up there; why not hit it for discovery too? I do like the feature to add more sources; the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution was particularly welcome as I have a lot of maritime material.

My next addition is another favorite, U.S. Naval Astronomical Expedition to the Southern Hemisphere. This is in the U.S. Serial Set collection at Library of Congress. It's a multi-volume set with wonderful maps, illustrations, illustrations, and descriptions of South America circa 1850. LT works well; again I'm the first with the book.

Number Five. I was going to do another tough one ("The American Ship-Master's Guide and Commercial Assistant, Being an Enlargement of the Seaman's Manual Useful to Merchants, Ship-Masters, Consuls, Supercargoes, Mariners and Merchant's Clerks", 1838) but what's the point? Let's see if there's some social networking around contemporary stuff.

Let's look at Mark Bowden's "Black Hawk Down." I don't own it but it's a good book. Much better metadata; editions more clearly defined; and cool networked effects. "Swap this book" shows me a store that will take my supposed copy, presumably in trade for something else? Tried to use BookMooch but it needs another registration. Yeah, right. "Conversations" link had a few outdated threads; probably much more active on a newer title. The one thing that impressed was the social information / recommendations machine; I had read 13 of the 20 titles on the list. Yeah, we are all unique, just like everyone else :)

Looking around a little more, I find the BookSuggester - how much are we paying Thomson Gale for What Do I Read Next? I'll have to do some searching and find a comparison. Seriously good tools in the tools tab, and then there's LibraryThing for Libraries. I sent away for some info; we'll see where it takes us.

I've been reading about this for a while. Now I see why! Very nice.

w5/e10/generators

Fun topic, fun tools. Found the Bob Dylan Subterranean Homesick Blues video generator on the generator blog. Recognized Allan Ginsburg, but who knew Bob Neuwirth? Wonder if Tim and Dave saw the original?

I was going to make a Dylanesque announcement of a new database, but our most recent is Dun & Bradstreet's Key Business Ratios. Argh. Dylan and Wall Street didn't work for me, so I sent my older son a reminder of an upcoming event (click on it to load):




OK, is is just me, or does anyone else see Ellen Fleiss in Dylan's expression at the end?

Finding feeds

My problem is weeding, not discovery! Too many blogs, too many feeds. Along with the classics (shifted, stuff, researchbuzz) I like It's All Good (http://scanblog.blogspot.com/) and Catalogblog (http://catalogablog.blogspot.com/) for their interesting mixes of content.

I played with Feedster for a while, and it seems like it is mostly commercial or borderline spam. I played with topix for a while (new to me) and found some interesting local material. Local is the big kahuna that nobody has really cracked, despite billions of dollars spent trying.

Another find today was Google Blogsearch - http://blogsearch.google.com/ - which I had read about but never used. It turned up quite a few interesting blog articles about things happening around town, and very little commercial cruft. Funniest (saddest?) was South Florida Housing Bubble ( http://www.soflahousing.com/ ) documenting pain in the local real estate market. 50% off peak prices? Ouch.

RSS redux

Ah, Bloglines, check! I added a Sun-Sentinel feed; didn't know they were there. Cool. I remember when the New York Times added RSS feeds; they were the first major player to adopt RSS and it marked a turning point in the acceptance of the technology.

In the early days, most people thought RSS was useless. There's a chicken and egg problem will most social tools; they don't make sense until there are a lot of people using them, but people don't want to use them unless there are a lot of reasons to do so. Now it is obvious, what with podcasting (RSS with enclosures) and every media company in the world supporting feeds. Wasn't always so.

The person who did the most to make this week's technology happen is Dave Winer; his blog is http://scripting.com If I could only read one blog, I think that would be it. OK, slashdot. No, Winer. No, slashdot. Whatever.

The only good thing about blogging on the Bloglines platform (where I guess Susi is still stuck!) is that your blogroll was automatically created with all your Bloglines feeds. From here I have to point you to http://www.bloglines.com/public/richmonda but I'll warn you there's a lot of good stuff in there!

TLC blogs and RSS

This week's instructions say the TLC blogroll is RSS-powered. In that case, pay no attention to the php behind the curtain: Yeah, OK, I fixed the page so it doesn't say that anymore. But maybe someone still wants to see a little php :)

Wow! Here are all the blogs registered in TLC:
";
$incs = "E:\wamp\www\\tlc\db_info.inc";
include($incs);
$cnx = mysqli_connect($host, $user, $password, $dbname);
$sql = "SELECT * FROM userblogs ORDER BY library DESC, blogname";
$result = mysqli_query($cnx,$sql);
echo "\n";
while($row = mysqli_fetch_assoc($result))
{
$n = $row['blogname'];
$u = $row['blogurl'];
$l = $row['library'];
echo "\n";
}
echo "

$n

($l)

";
?>

Somebody probably has a list of all the RSS feeds for our blogs, but it ain't me :)

Random technology post

Yeah, Tallmanicus moved from Bloglines to Blogger. I was a Movable Type fan in the early days of MT - it was written in perl, making it easy for me to install on my server. (Too bad the Wayback Machine didn't save my CSS :)) Blogger was always out there too. Now I can see how it is doing.

Blogger was started in 1999 - eight years ago. It's included on this cool map of web trends, whose design was inspired by the famous London tube map (Harry Beck, 1933). Also included is Edward Tufte (way over on the left), who discussed the London original in one of his books - I think The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

I wonder if anything on that map was invented by a librarian?

First post

Another joke: "First post" is the tradition of making the senseless comment "First post" in response to a new article posted on Slashdot.