Week 8 - Thing #19

LibraryThing

LibraryThing lets you catalog the books in your library, then lets you share your library with others. It's a neat way to network and communicate with the people who have the same books that you do. I've been on LibraryThing at some time in the past because I already had an account set up, but I had no books in my library. It was very easy to add titles and very addicting - looking at the things other people had and LibraryThing's suggestions based on what I own. As for the popularity of my books, it ran the gamut. I have a copy of The DaVinci Code, the same as 16,000 other people, but I also had one book that wasn't shared with anyone else. Several of my books were mentioned in discussions - one in a discussion about the worst books ever that was pretty interesting. It just goes to show that everyone definitely has different tastes in reading material.

I also experimented with the LT widget and added it to the sidebar of this blog. I also tried to add it to my blog over at Edublogs, but was unsuccessful there. After exploring the FAQs, I found that they don't allow javascript widgets in their sidebars because apparently those open the site up to hackers. That was disappointing. I like how the widget shows random selections from my library in the sidebar over there. I did, however find a LibraryThing badge for my edublogs blog that will link people to my LibraryThing library.