I wrote this in January and forgot all about it. So its title was rather apt. In the end, I got totally hooked on Library Thing and never finished the review.
Having done nearly all of my filing (3 months worth), paid the bills, rung to complain about the lack of shower (ending with a discussion of the merits of the Polish plumber), tidied my desk and made a to do list for next week (rather than finishing the one for this week), I felt it was time for a day off. So I started a book review of Ismail Kadare's Broken April, which I had been promising myself to reread for a long time. I needed to reread it, and some other books as well. I'm only a third of the way through the reread, but I decided to be disciplined and make some notes for the review as I went along, rather than rush something out at the end.
But when I looked to see what ViolainVilnius had written about the book, I found a new comment on the review. This led me to a new website Stepping Stones based in Tirana and some really interesting photos, so I needed to look at those, her photo blog, her food blog and then her list of books. I spotted she was using a book program I had never heard of, LibraryThing, so I had to investigate that (justified by my new year resolutions, which I realised I had forgotten to post, so another diversion). While there I spotted an article entitled "Ontology is over-rated". I am always a sucker for articles debunking the use of long words whose meaning I don't understand, so off I went. It's a fascinating read, starting with classifications such as the periodic table, and moving on to library classification systems (did you know that the Balkan Peninsula, Africa and Asia are all on the same level in the Dewey system to optimise shelf space in the library at the time, and nothing has been changed since?) The article promised to show how
that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong. In particular, I want to convince you that many of the ways we're attempting to apply categorization to the electronic world are actually a bad fit, because we've adopted habits of mind that are left over from earlier strategies. I also want to convince you that what we're seeing when we see the Web is actually a radical break with previous categorization strategies
Then it goes on to talk about classifications which have traditionally been made relying on definitions of what is important set up by experts in advance, which is quite the opposite of what happens on the web, where searches are made "on the fly" by users who are definitely not expert. Most searches on Google must be by people wanting expertise about something they don't know. Tags and links are the new future classifications. But they suffer from signal loss problems:
Some people say they're interested in movies. Some people say they're interested in film. Some people say they're interested in cinema. The cataloguers' first reaction to that is, "Oh my God, that means you won't be introducing the movies people to the cinema people!" To which the obvious answer is "Good. The movie people don't want to hang out with the cinema people."
The article is really interesting about social networks and people's tagging strategies in del.icio.us. What? You don't tag things? How do you live? That green book on death somewhere on the right on the top shelf? (Oh it's really blue!)
Lost the plot already? So have I. What happened to Kadare? Time for lunch.
Back to the library software. I don't care about the software but I do like to get book recommendations and I hate not knowing what books I already have. I used to have a pda with a Bookbag list, to consult in bookshops but the pda died and Bookbag now uses ISDNs for American editions which made it hard to quickly enter them. So let's see if this LibraryThing is any good. It promises a list on a mobile phone and offers a book scanner.
