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 of months. But I only just noticed. Still.

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 pages – although limited to Twitter’s 140-char limit, less a 13-digit ISBN.

Should really finish another bkish project before trying this one, although the two would mesh quite nicely together, eh, Tom?

OK. Back to work.

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 pretty raw-boned at the minute. I was also really disappointed to find out that the tag mirror, which displays everyone else’s tags on your books, is down and has been for a while, with no update. Sharing tags like this is pretty much the single most interesting feature of truly social sites (e.g. Last.fm tag radio and Flickr’s tag clusters).

Now I’ve got my reading history on there (bar those books lost and borrowed over the years, and those in misc. piles behind doors and under beds), I’m looking forward to using it to map my reading present – but this does involve remembering to add a book when I start reading it and logging when I finish. I look forward to the day when my ebooks have their own RSS feed (or similar) and every hundred pages unlocks an achievement.

If you’d like to be my friend on LibraryThing, it’s stml, like pretty much everywhere else…