December 28, 2006

Library Thing

So i recently found a new on-line social networking toy. It's called Library Thing, and as you can see I have two of their widgets in the right hand column of this blog, "Recent books from my library" and "my tag cloud" which is the various labels I have asighned to my books. Library Thing allows you to tag and manage your books in a similar way that delicious allows you to manage your web bookmarks. You can find other people with similar interests when it comes to books, talk about them, trade them and many other things.

After three or four days I finally finished entering my library into the system. No longer do I have to figure out what section to shelve a particular book under. Now they can be tagged under multiple labels, and then shelved alphabetically by author. (For instance, Blue Like Jazz is tagged under emerging church, culture, ministry, and spirituality.) Do I have a certain book? I don't have to look, I just search my library on-line. What book do I want to read next? What topic do I want to read about next? I just click that tag and see all my books in that section.

How does this matter to you? If you live around here, you can see what's on my shelf and ask to borrow it... if you have three forms of ID, a personal reference, and a $100 deposit. : )

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