Clay's Blog

Just ran across a really cool social networking site based on one’s book collection. It’s called LibraryThing and it’s an online catalog where you can store your own personal library.But this is only the beginning. You get library quality data about the books in your collection and you can share your catalog with other users to connect with people who have similar reading habits (or dissimilar for that matter). You get a nice tag cloud for each book in your collection, a list of similar books in other fellow owner’s collections, ratings, and much more. It’s a really neat idea and will prove very useful to me.

I’ve played around with similar concepts with music CD trading called lala.com and for music listening with Last.fm and audioscrobbler.

I was also pleased to see that LibraryThing is selling CueCat barcode scanners to use to help catalog your library quickly and easily. The price is $15 which is a lot more than the original price – free. Check out my entry on the CueCat for details. And if you join LibraryThing, check out my library.

Clay’s Library

Just ran across an interesting new site that’s focused on finding information about consumer electronics equipment. It’s a nice search engine that pulls up info like product manuals, support sites, and reviews, along with links to retail sites. I did a search for my favorite piece of equipment in my media cabinet, the Philips DVP-642 DivX Certified DVD player. The top link was to the PDF of the manual online and following that a handy link to the VideoHelp.com DVD Player Forum with information on the region-free remote control hack for the player. Nice.

http://www.retrevo.com