What's hot?
I've added a "Hot topics" category to Talk. Heat is calculated every hour, and is based on posts and viewers in the the last 48 hours. It adjusts for the length of posts, so one-line posts don't count as much—You hear me Drop a Word, Add a Word? A topic with a lot of flags is penalized and it adjusts the numbers slightly to prevent groups from dominating the list.
More heat on its way...
Labels: new features
posted by Tim at 7:45 AM
8 Comments:
I really like this feature! It allows me to sample groups I normally don't view. Thanks.
Is it possible to do something similar but with individual book titles? I'm most interested in finding books I'd not normally gravitate towards, and while I do on occasion search things out, I'd probably be influenced by this "passive" means of discovery more often than I take the time actively to seek out interesting titles.
I wonder why "tags" is not showing up on the banner anymore. Without tags there, when I want to add a book, I have to go over to my profile, click "all tags" and then try to remember the exact wording because I have hit back a couple of times.
It's much more tedious and much easier to make tags that are not exactly alike.
Why did you take tags from the banner head away?
When you do something like that, you could give your subscribers notice. When you did different things with editors' names (they disappeared for a while, and I worked individually on mine), you gave no notice.
Ellen Moody
See http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=62700
312 messages worth of discussion.
I read Tim's explanation. He says upfront he doesn't regret it and clearly no argument is doing to make him change back.
For the record, I went to the trouble of putting all my books on this website to enable me to organize my books or library. I don't use the term library usually but am not ashamed of it, you could call an 8000 plus book collection a library, only it's a selective one which concentrates on our interests. I've never thought of the word as having elite or anti-social vibes particularly: reading is the poor man's great option for it can cost little, partly because of public libraries.
So I did look upon this place as a cyberspace equivalent of the buildings down the street. I think it's social and interesting to see other people's collections and how many and what kind the average person who can come into cyberspace and negotiated this software, pay the fee has. Beyond that most of the attempts at socializing I see are about as successful (by which I mean not very) as facebook and other walls on the screen. That's a select group to start with, but there are a lot of people here.
I've been disappointed with some of the results. I still can't use the cyberspace software to search my library because items are not disambiguated. The engine is unforgiving about differences in spelling. The card catalogues of older libraries are better than this software in other words.
Now I lost the tags. They were helpful. If I hadn't gone to the trouble of putting the books on, I'd stop. It is a list that tells me more or less what I have and Jim has made a copy of it. Before Library Thing we really didn't have a grasp of what we have. And we reshelved as we went.
It seems to me paradoxical to discover that the man who started this thing (with a wife who writes books) treats the word "library" as one he wants to avoid. Such sensitivities towards possessive pronouns too I hadn't expected.
Ellen Moody
You didn't lose the tags. You lost a shortcut to the tags display on your catalog. That display is still available. Indeed, as many note, you can bookmark it.
LibraryThing could offer a thousand tabs for every feature, and when we made it 999, we could be accused of "taking away" a feature, even though that feature was accessible elsewhere. We offer fewer because tabs take up space, and we have to choose. All things being equal having one link to your catalog seemed better than having two, one of which defaulted to the "tags" mode.
Regarding "My Library" I don't think you read that very carefully. In fact, "My Library" is going to stay, but as the term for one of your collections—the collection that represents what you actually have. Calling your wish list "your library" is a bit strange.
Tim
Public libraries are rare places in our societies where you don't need connections to get in. Once upon a time they functioned to enable people to escape concentration camps during WW2 and since. Now with the demand for more authentication of who you are by those who run the states, this function is at risk.
E.M.
>Public libraries are rare places in our societies where you don't need connections to get in. Once upon a time they functioned to enable people to escape concentration camps during WW2 and since. Now with the demand for more authentication of who you are by those who run the states, this function is at risk.
I'm confused. Are you thinking LT is limiting library access?
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