Everybody's Doing the LibraryThing

I had fun setting up my LibraryThing library and will probably continue to add titles.

That being said, I've been using LibraryThing as a Readers' Advisory tool for a while now. What works great for that purpose is the list of books suggested. So if a customer tells me they liked Richard Russo's Empire Falls I search that in LibraryThing and see what other books are suggested based on those who've listed Empire Falls in their library. Explaining it takes far more time then the actual searching and when I use the results in conjunction with other resources, it works very well. I find it especially useful when I'm looking up books I'm not familiar with. Invariably, I'll find a title or author I am familiar with in the results list.

Where it doesn't work as well is with the lesser known works or with authors who've got a lot of books under their belt. For the latter the lists will end up containing many of the author's other works and that isn't helpful if I'm looking for further reading.

And while I find the Unsuggester fun the most practical use I can find for it is to use it as something to show customers to get conversation started. And if I were Queen of the Publishing World this is the book I'd provide for LT novices.

My first YouTube Entry

Veronica Franco by Tintoretto

Veronica Franco by Tintoretto
Originally uploaded by rosewithoutathorn84

The first thing I did when I started to explore Flickr was to search the other Veronicas out there in the world. I was pleased to find Veronica Franco as one of the first hits that came up and decided to "blog this". She certainly led an interesting life as an educated woman who was a poet and a courtesan. She even successfully fought for her freedom when she was accused of witchcraft! Go Veronica! If you're interested in more about this Veronica, there's a book about her in LINKcat.

What I like about Flickr is the quantity and the quality of the pictures available. I've created a Flickr account but so far have only used it as a place to store photos that I've used for work purposes (so they're not available to the public). But because they're stored online I'm able to give co-workers access to the photos.

Sometimes I wonder how these web communities stay afloat financially speaking. A web service of this magnitude is a costly endeavor. Do they make their money selling prints? Selling advanced options? There's no advertising to speak of. So I'm curious. Anyone know?

Is There Anyone Out There?

When I thought about what I could write to elicit some comments I realized I should talk about how hard it is to do just that.

In reading other blogs and posting in my own I've noticed that you can never tell which post is going to generate a lot of comment. It could be the post arguing that the world is flat or that dinosaurs still roam the planet generating endless debate. But it could just as easily be the one that innocently says you don't like the actress who plays Kendall on All My Children.

So what I've tried to learn is to just write what I want to write about and try not to angst too much about whether or not anyone is letting me know that they're listening. Easier said then done of course. I know that I've been guilty of checking and re-checking posts I've written to see if anyone has commented. But I've also tried to tell myself that just because no one has said anything, it doesn't mean they haven't read my post. I can believe, can't I?

In an effort to generate discussion for this post I'll ask you what are some of the blog subjects you've seen generate a lot of comment? Seen any flame wars start? Have you ever thought about posting a comment but been too shy to do so?

Feeding the Mind

I considered myself pretty comforatable with Bloglines and Google Reader so I decided to give the Beta version of Bloglines a try. I can see that they're trying to be similar to GR but I don't think they have all the components yet and I missed being able to do some of the things I could do with Bloglines, let's call it alpha.

Once I was done exploring the beta version I decided to try getting my feeds to show up on my blog as a blogroll and experienced one of those "I know I should be able to do this, but I can't figure out how" hours. Leading me to wish I had a Logan to lean on like this Veronica does.

The instructions were pretty basic. Go to your bloglines profile and make sure to change the setting to a public one for access to the blogroll and then use the Bloglines HTML helper to get the code for the blog. Took me a little while with those things, but I thought I had it all figured out. But when I pasted into the additional elements portion of the template in this blog all I got was a message saying my username wasn't active. Huh!? Tried with my old Bloglines account - same deal. How was I getting it wrong?

Turned out I was making an assumption (and you know what they say about those). I assumed that my username would be the first part of my login for Bloglines. Turns out I needed to note the little * next to the username field and pick a username for my public Bloglines persona.

Success at last! My Bloglines feeds are now links on my blog, woohoo! Thanks for the tips and chance to learn Project Player Gurus.