Suggestion meme
I love how the blogosphere picks things up and runs with them. I asked for some feedback on the suggestions feature, and it became this independent meme. I particularly enjoy this submeme—listing all the books with little icons next to them—have it, don't have it, good idea, bad idea, etc.
Are there any others to post here?
Are there any others to post here?
posted by Tim at 1:11 AM
26 Comments:
my list is here, though i don't do little icons.
since the post also contains my wish for what suggestions could do for me, i won't repeat myself here (especially since i think i might be an outlier in this case).
the suggestions are pretty much dead on for me, much more so than amazon ever has been. i already have most of the suggested books. :)
People keep saying they'd like more rec's on the weaker sections of their library. Could Library Thing ever rate the titles listed in the tags by order of popularity? Perhaps even with cross referencing?
Mmmm... Cross referencing...
Something like: "Tag: WWII: Top 100"
or "Tags: England, History, -WWI: Top 20," perhaps?
There are (at present) eight 'suggestions' entries on the LJ LT community: http://www.livejournal.com/community/librarything/
There may well be more before the weekend is out.
Pssst, Tim, get yourself an LJ login (they're free) or an OpenID, then you don't have to comment as 'Anonymous' any more!
how do I delete a book off my catalog? The book was listed 3 times by mistake....
Jan, I've done that, too! In "your catalog", click on "more options", and you should see a red "X" for each listing. Click on that, and the listing will be deleted.
You can look at mine here, though like Kukkurovaca mine is categorized.
Looking at both my recommendations and those posted by other users, it seems that if you take away SF/fantasy and 19th century lit, you are not left with much. Where are all the readers of pomo, history, science, travel lit, meaty bios, philosophy, political rants... or is it that they just do not hang on Library Thing?
No, they do (check out Foucault or Ellis' Founding Brothers. SF is swamping it because it comes in little books you buy lots and lots of. Even Ambrose can't hold a candle to Azimov or Heinlein.
Clearly it needs to correct for this somehow. The answer is, I think, Deweys or LC numbers. First, I need to get them for all the books that just came through Amazon.
Will the suggestions list ever update? I have added a lot of books since it was first generated, and my list has remained exactly the same, which surprises me. I'm supposed to be able to regenerate it once a day, but I don't see any way to do that.
Hey, I added the update feature. You can do it once per day. Since it doesn't consider entry date, you may be surprised by how little it changes, or it might change a whole lot not because of anything you did but because it reacts to changes in others' libraries. At some point I could star new entries, but the system isn't designed for that right now.
The only other suggestion I can think of is an icon/category for:
- Have owned it in the past, enjoyed it too, but had to let it go because I needed room for all the new books I keep buying :-P
I'd say that at least two-thirds of the books on my suggestion list fall into this single, frustrating category!
Just spotted some more strange behaviour.
Zeitgeist shous the top 25 books (American Gods has 303 copies in the database).
Clicking the [more] link to show the top 100 books shows that American Gods has 213 copies.
Clicking on American Gods on Zeitgeist (or in my library) shows 294 owners (and 5 duplicates).
Also the top 100 doesn't show a title for position 9 - just that there are 202 copies of it.
Clicking on a title in the top 100 gives the following error "Warning: extract() [function.extract]: First argument should be an array in /home/virtual/site8/fst/var/www/html/card_card.php on line 110" and does not retrieve a book.
andyl. Thanks. The two weren't updating in tandem—indeed the top 100 hadn't been updated in a while.
I'm not getting that array error. Hmm..
OK, while we are on odd figures... If I look at my profile, I share most books with meburste (246). If I go to Similar libraries, she has been relegated to second place with 225 books shared with me. Same applies if I look at her profile and similar libraries. What's happened to those 21 books?
Someone suggested allowing users to rate their own books similar to the way NetFlix lets you rate movies (a five point scale). More weight could then be given in the "suggestions" algorithm to those books we have rated highly. It seems like that would allow us to "point" the algorithm to the areas of our libraries we are most interested in. Seems like a good idea...
I'm not sure I want to see ratings everywhere. I find them obtrusive, my brain spends too much time trying to make sense of them or arguing with them.
The ratings wouldn't necessarily have to be public. They could just be a way of telling the algorithm "I really liked this book and would be interested in others like it" or "I hated this book but just haven't gotten rid of it so please remove it from the calculation". Maybe a feature where you go through your library and check off a group of books and get suggestions based upon that subset rather than your whole library... That would provide a way to "feature" smaller sections.
Sorry, My last comment was a bit negative. I don't want to see stars everwhere or somesuch, but a "don't recommend me any more by this author" "i own that in another edition" or "don't include these books when making recommendations" features might be good.
I'm loving the recommendations on individual books, some interesting juxtapositions.
Allowing members to rate their own tags in order of importance to them and incorporating this ranking into the algorithm would allow members to self-select categories that most interest them. So, Tim, you could rank your Dutch poetry high in your list of tags, and the algorithm could weight that tag more heavily regardless of the fact that you have few books with that tag. If someone has lots of sci-fi but doesn't really want recommendations for more, they can rank that tag very low.
Cheers Tim. The link from Top 100 to the book is now working for me as well.
What is http://webservices.amazon.fr/onca/xml ? I get an XML file that says it's missing in a parameter, in French.
I've just added a dozen or two fantasy & science fiction books to my library, and suddenly that's all I find in my Suggestions page.
Do I need to wait a day to regenerate it, or is this a consequence of SF/fantasy readers buying lots and lots of books? :7)
How about polling the community for new fields to add, then adding the top few vote-getters?
I, for example, would like a field that indicates where my books are stored, since the tags I use for this purpose have thrown my tag cloud all out of whack.
I'll second the suggestion seen elsewhere to add a field indicating where the user got the book and how much it cost and when.
But this forces me to ask: have you considered this, and decided that the existing "Comments" field should serve this purpose?
(I paid my ten bucks, now watch me wrestle you for the reins!)
After an "ownership" field, IMHO the next most useful would be a read/inprogress/notread field. Although owning a book says *something* about my preferences, it really doesn't say as much as having actually *read* it. Maybe even read/inprogress/notread/neverwanttoread, so there's also a way to say "never recommend this book to me". Of course, this would also replace my "inprogress" and "toread" tags.
Here's mine. This seems to work pretty well as most of the listed books are ones I already considered to be holes in my library.
There's an interesting thing with Book Recommendations: if a book only belongs to a couple of people (ie, in the 3-4 range)
LIke this one: , the top recommendations come from ration 1/1 - ie, one person, owning the only copy of the book. Perhaps this should be adjusted in some fashion?
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