Gratuitous back-pat / help on two coming features
Noticed that clicking on a tag is suddenly quicker? That query alone was responsible for about half the server load. Clicking on a tag like "fiction" in a "global" context brought the machine to a standstill for everyone. It's much better now. Fiction's still takes a second, but that's better than 30.
Feature 1: Ratings
Okay, I cave; you win. I'm going to add ratings. I propose they be 1-5 stars, with no stars being unrated. I've decided on stars—thumbs are too dorky—but I'm going to avoid the "Amazon" look. Nor will I be importing star data from them. LibraryThing is not Amazon!
The stars will be easily mass-editable, either in power edit or by a new "AJAX" way. However I do it, you'll be able to rate a whole bunch of books at a time—zip zip zip.
Feature 2: Tag pages
I'm going to add a page for every tag, showing related tags, top books with that tag, etc. The only trick is how to get to it. I want the tag links to still function as a search, at least within a personal catalog. I may kill system-wide catalog tag searches, making them go to the "tag page" instead. (They still take up a lot of resources; there are almost a million tags now!) Your thoughts are welcome. What do you want to see? How do you want to get to it?
Comments, criticisms, anecdotes—go ahead.
Feature 1: Ratings
Okay, I cave; you win. I'm going to add ratings. I propose they be 1-5 stars, with no stars being unrated. I've decided on stars—thumbs are too dorky—but I'm going to avoid the "Amazon" look. Nor will I be importing star data from them. LibraryThing is not Amazon!
The stars will be easily mass-editable, either in power edit or by a new "AJAX" way. However I do it, you'll be able to rate a whole bunch of books at a time—zip zip zip.
Feature 2: Tag pages
I'm going to add a page for every tag, showing related tags, top books with that tag, etc. The only trick is how to get to it. I want the tag links to still function as a search, at least within a personal catalog. I may kill system-wide catalog tag searches, making them go to the "tag page" instead. (They still take up a lot of resources; there are almost a million tags now!) Your thoughts are welcome. What do you want to see? How do you want to get to it?
Comments, criticisms, anecdotes—go ahead.
posted by Tim at 6:22 PM
16 Comments:
For ratings, I'd really like to see more than just the average be reported. A little thumbnail histogram would be wonderful. It's not very computationally difficult to create, and provides WAY more useful information than just an average. Bimodal distributions are the norm, not the exception, in ratings...
Just something that shows the number of 1s, 2s, 3s, etc. I can do that, I suppose.
Global ratings don't do much for me. OTOH, ratings weighted by users' "similarness" to me might be cool. (Owning a book might seem to be an implict positive rating, and the recommendations do seem to work well on that basis, but I do own plenty of bad books on purpose. E.g. I have a small collection of "the economy is going to collapse" books that are now outdated that I've bought at the dollar store, yard sales, etc. And I even own the Catholic catechism...)
Or, if there were a way to have "friends" on LT, seeing my friends' ratings would be interesting. (I.e. similar to Netflix' approach.)
Anyway, thanks for continuing to improve LT! :)
Would the tag pages have RSS feed of their own?
Tim, I admit I'm asking this question in the wrong place, but ... I don't understand the "styles" options for display. Other than the option to change the number of entries displayed, making changes doesn't seem to have any effect. Is this a new feature that hasn't yet been released, or am I doing something wrong?! Thanks for a very cool way to waste a lot of weekends and evenings!
Sorry to compound my sin, but ... I figured out how to change the display, even if I don't understand why ...
Truth be told, I doubt I'd use a ratings system. I'm not a big fan of "pick a number between 1 and 5 (or 10 or whatever)". It doesn't tell me anything about what the person really thought of the book, or why they are giving it a particular rating. (Is it a 1 because you don't care for the genre, or because the book is badly-written? I expect all my books will show as "unrated", unless they are stupendously brilliant or atrocious.
I hear you. I wasn't too wild on it either—of course, in testing the feature I also caught the bug.
This is a user request—proof I can be flexible when dozens of users pound their forks on the table and insist. :)
It's actually up now. Go to "change fields" to add the ratings field to your current view. It's technically cool in so far as you can edit the stars right on your catalog. No saving or submitting is necessary.
I'm making some tweaks and adding it on some other screens, but not adding any statistics yet. I'll blog about it soon.
Tag pages: great! How about tying them into the edit page, del.icio.us-style? (Seeing how other people tag is good for convergent tagging schemes.)
Another idea: on the current tags page, the tag could link to the new breakdown page, while the bracketed number links to the query ("27 books... and here they are").
Final thought: I've already seen a couple of explanations of peoples ideosyncratic tags in their profiles. Perhaps this could be supported in the new tag-view system?
Convergent tagging: I'm don't know about this. I like that people tag their own way. Suggested tags feel like tyrany to me.
I *like* your "what do tags mean?" idea. Meta-metadata, as it were. At a minimum, I could suggest that as a topic for the "About my library" field.
Tim, thanks for not "Amazoning" this site. When you do decide to sell this site, please consider anyone but Amazon. Thanks, Tom
The best just keeps getting better! Replacing system wide tag searches with a tag page seems like a good idea. I personally can't see much use in a system wide tag search given the personal nature of tags...
I think convergent tagging is a good idea. I tag my stuffs according to what I think of it, but between 'math', 'maths', 'mathematic', 'mathematics', I don't see any difference, and it would be nice to see what the majority use in cases like this, so the similarity engine (if there is such thing) can work better for me.
A tag autocompletion (from only my own tag list) would be welcomed to, in the edit page or future AJAXy tag entering field.
i'd like to be able to search for two tags - for example, i've been putting books from two geographically separate libraries into my librarything, with tags to distinguish the two. i'd like to be able to list all the history books i currently have access to - that is, those tagged as both "austin" and "history." is there a way to do this that i haven't found yet?
I was thinking about tagging my wife's books with her name, but I remembered that all tags are public, so that probably wouldn't be a good idea. I could tag them with 'wife' but that really isn't useful to anyone but me. I think it would be useful to make a distinction between public tags that everyone could see and private tags that are for attributes that are only meaningful to me, such as ownership or location.
See, I think you're taking tagging too seriously. It's okay to use tags that have no meaning to anyone buy you. It's similarly okay to use tags that are transitory an personal, like "to read." To the extent that tags are used by others, this information washes out. Nobody will search on "wife." Personally, I think tagging is primarily useful within your own collection, and only useful outside of it when analyzed statistically by LibraryThing itself. (I won't reveal details, but LT is and will be increasingly using tags in interesting statistical ways.)
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