booktwo.org

Just a quick note to say that, after a long hiatus, one of my favourite pieces of data visualisation is back*: LibraryThing’s Tag Mirror.

The Tag Mirror shows what everyone on LT thinks about your books. And what lovely runs of expression! “drama drugs dystopia economics elephants”. “postmodern programming prostitution psychiatry”. Oh my!

The data crunching involved makes my head hurt, but as someone who doesn’t bother to tag my own books, it’s a wonderful sight to behold, and a great start for reading explorations. Cheers Tim!

* Actually, it looks like it’s been back for a couple…

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I’ve been thinking about how to create RSS feeds and achievements for pBooks, almost an API. Here’s a quick, on-the-way-to-work scheme. Think Foamee. Bkkeeper monitors your twitter feed for @bkkeeper notes – just text an ISBN and ‘start’, ‘end’ or a page number to your Twitter stream. On ‘start’, bkkeeper adds that ISBN to your LibraryThing account and fills in the ‘started on’ date. It continues to follow your progress as you read the book, then when it gets an ‘end’ message it fills in the ‘finished on’ date. Further enhancements could include blogging dog-eared…

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I got my Cuecat a couple of weeks ago and spent a happy couple of hours scanning in this whole bookshelf, which consists of approximately 90% of my library. The above is a detail from the resulting author cloud.

I like the cuecat as a nice little interface tool, necessary now like a CD reader was when you fed all your old CDs into iTunes, then promptly put them all away in a box. In this case of course, we’re only ripping the metadata, not the books themselves.

LibraryThing works very well, even if it’s…

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