Twitter your reviews

We've added a feature to make it easy to Twitter (or Tweet) your reviews.



You'll see the option—a tiny Twitter logo—on your reviews. When you click it, it takes you to Twitter and fills in the message box. You can, of course, edit it however you like.



You can spot most such tweets with this Twitter search.

This is our second Twitter-based feature. The other is an easy way to Twitter your books to LibraryThing, handy for making a note of a book when you're in a bookstore or library. Like that, the Twitter your review feature is all about restraint and options. We've rejected the idea—popular among book and non-book sites—of automating that process, of making it easy to machine-gun all your friends and followers with trivial updates.

Are you on Twitter? Follow us. Most LibraryThing-related news comes from my account, LibraryThingTim. The LThing account is for incoming messages mostly. John, Chris and Luke are also on, discussing LibraryThing's irrationally vague vacation policy.

Widget Contest Winners

Back in March we updated the widgets for sharing a bit of your LibraryThing library on your blog or other web page. We asked for your best widget design, and a bunch of you delivered the goods. I know its been over a month since the contest closed, and would like to assure you that this is at least 80% due to making cool new things for LibraryThing, and only 20% due to the creation of a company skateboarding gang. Such is Springtime.

First Prize. These five winners get a one year membership to the site. Transferable to a loved one if desired. Also their choice of a CueCat or t-shirt. The top 3 will go into the preset styles list on the make widget page.

paradoxosalpha's entry reminds me of a math classroom. I'm going to put it in the preset styles as "classroom." Steal it.

Besides having a great comic collection, stephmo displays them with gusto. Many users do a cool things using the tags from their library to create themed widgets, with a background style to match. Look for it in the preset styles as "shazam." Steal it.

gordon361 submits another one in green. The covers that float through here are often biographies, military, or history related, and they look very at home on this poker table green background. Its going in the presets as "Poker Table." Steal it.

pratchettfan's widget looks very at home on his blog where it resides. I like his use of color matching.
http://pratchettfan.blogspot.com/ Steal it.

poxd painted outside the lines a bit, using our API and some code from Yahoo to create this. It was too good not to reward.

Second Prize. These 10 winners will recieve their choice of a CueCat or t-shirt.

In no particular order (links go to the widget):

• thegreattim
• Anneli
• SqueakyChu
• monarchi
• megacoupe
• heathmochafrost
• TienSingh
• DevourerOfBooks
• yapete
• jcberk

Everyone who submitted to the Contest threads will recieve a laptop/car sticker, a real-world widget.

If you're one of the entrants, send a comment to user timspalding or email info@librarything.com to claim your prize. Include your member name, mailing address, and choice of prize, if applicable.

(post by Luke, not Tim)

More servers, less sleep

We just finished moving about a dozen of our original servers from our "colo" in Maine to one in Somerville, where another dozen were waiting. In the process, we've basically doubled our server power.

We're still waiting to get all our metrics back up, and we have a few weeks of retasking servers (a lot will be wearing different hats), but, so far, the results have been very encouraging. We are faster today, and will be getting faster tomorrow. We have a lot more memory, disk space and system redundancy too—so keep adding books.



We've collected all our pictures on a Flickr tag Great LibraryThing Server Schlepp. Here are some of the better ones.

The move was a group affair. Abby, Sonya, Mike, Dan and I did all the physical work. Our Australian systems administrator directed us by video chat—and burned through his monthly bandwidth doing it. Abby and I did a trial run with one server on Wednesday. The rest pulled an all-nighter, except Sonya who arrived like a well-rested and showered cavalry at 7am. When we were done, Mike and I went back to my parents' in Cambridge and slept like logs. Abby, who was taking care of a toddler, stayed up the whole day. Ouch—and kudos to her.

Reviews in many languages

I've added a bunch of features around the language that members write reviews in.

Reviews by language. The result is to make LibraryThing more attractive for non-English users—they now get reviews in their own language by default. A few languages, especially our Dutch, French and German sites, already have a decent number of reviews, and this should make it more fun for all non-English users to review books.

For the English-only members, the feature is mostly negative—it's now easy to screen out the clutter of reviews in languages you don't understand.



Most popular works have reviews in other languages. Something like the Da Vinci Code has reviews in thirteen languages, including twelve in Dutch, three in Swedish, two in Catalan and one in Greek! ("Un dels millors llibres que he llegit mai", "Το λάτρεψα"—maybe it's better in translation!)

Reviews uClassified: Most reviews have already been assigned to a language. Rather than use the default language in LibraryThing profiles, which turns out to be very, very weakly related to the language members write their reviews in, I took advantage of the excellent language classification service offered by uClassify (uClassify.com). uClassify runs a Bayesian filter on a piece of text and sends back a list of languages, and confidence scores.

It isn't perfect, but it's pretty good. Only very high scores were accepted as definitive. Short reviews weren't sent for the same. As a result, about 1/8 of LibraryThing's 730,267 reviews remain as "not set."

Feature changes. A bunch.

• You can now edit your reviews language everywhere you can edit or enter a review. 
  
  
• Your library statistics page (link) now shows how many reviews you've written in every language. Mostly importantly this shows the number of reviews that haven't been assigned to a language.
  
• For reviews going forward your default language is set on your account page. 
  
• The catalog now has a "Reviews language" field and a special search for all your reviews in a given language (eg., reviews in English, language not set). These links are available from your stats page).
  
• You can Power Edit review languages, and when you're looking at all your reviews in a language, if it differs from your default language, you will get a link to make all unset reviews be in your default language. For example, here are all your unset reviews (link).

Statistics. The numbers turned out something like this.

English/Unset: 650,988
Dutch: 8,636
French: 4,666
German: 4,651
Spanish: 4,463
Italian: 2,876
Swedish: 2,329
Danish: 1,587
Norwegian: 1,231
Portuguese: 1,098
Finnish: 662
Catalan: 443
Etc.

To be done, talked about. As usual, there's more to do. So far, there's no good list of recent or top reviews by language. Come to discuss it on Talk and suggest other improvements.

Flash-mob catalog party in Omaha

Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts has planned a flash-mob cataloging party in Omaha, Nebraska on Wednesday, June 24th, between 9:30am and 5pm. They have a 600 volume library to catalog and can use all the help they can get. They recommend arriving between 9:30-10am, but come whenever for however long you can!

Volunteers will be honored with a complimentary Bemis Center membership and some delicious snacks. Contact BemisCenter or email (info.bemis.centergmail.com) if you're able to attend. Directions here on their website.

Collections in Widgets and Import

The new collections feature is making its way around the site. Two new features now, thanks to Mike:

Collections in widgets
There's a new option on the widget builder page that allows you to show books only from designated collection(s). Make a widget that shows off your "Currently reading" collection, or your "wishlist"!

Talk post about it.

Collections in import
Want to import books directly into your wishlist? Or another collection? The Universal Import now makes that possible. After you upload your file, you can pick which collection to put all the books into.

Talk post about it.

June Early Reviewer Books

The June batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We've got 68 books this month, and a grand total of 1,796 copies to give out.

First, make sure to sign up for Early Reviewers. If you've already signed up, please check your mailing address and make sure it's correct.

Then request away! The list of available books is here:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list

The deadline to request a copy is Friday, June 26th at 6PM EST.

Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the US, Canada, the UK, Israel, Australia, France and Germany. Make sure to check the flags by each book to see if it can be sent to your country.

And if you haven't been paying attention, we just released Collections. This is great for Early Reviewers who need to review their book but don't necessarily want to keep it in their library. Just make an Early Reviewers collection, and put the book there. That way the book (and review) stay associated with you, but you can, if you like, keep it separate from Your Library!

Thanks to all the publishers participating this month!

Howard Books	Canongate Books	HarperCollins
Crossway	Scribner	Raven Tree Press
Touchstone	Steerforth Press	Bloomsbury
Hachette Book Group	Ecco	Demos Medical Publishing
Bantam	Open Letter	WaterBrook Press
Doubleday Canada	Bottletree Books	HighBridge
Chin Music Press	Bell Bridge Books	Henry Holt and Company
Orca Book Publishers	Delacorte Press	Workman Publishing
Bethany House	Scholastic	Masterstroke
St. Martin's Press	St. Martin's Minotaur	Ballantine Books
St. Martin's Griffin	Beaufort Books	Conari Press
Bancroft Press	The Permanent Press	Skyhorse Publishing
Phoenix Books	WEbook	Viking Books

Collections, at last

It's arrived. Members can organize their books into "collections."

The Motive. From the beginning, LibraryThing members have used the site for different things. Some used it to list only the books they own, others what they've read and a few even just the books they wanted. Meanwhile, people like me used it for everything—owned, read, lost, destroyed, wanted—using tagging as our sole way of keeping everything straight. But even tag-zealots like me had to admit there were times you wanted sharper distinctions—"buckets" or "sub-libraries"—and ways to tie those to how you connected with other members and with book recommendations. New members, whether familiar with tags or not, were regularly asking for some way to do wishlists and currently-reading lists.

The Feature. The feature, literally years in the making, gives members the ability to separate out categories of books, like "Wishlist" and "Currently reading" more definitely than could be accomplished with tags. Each collections works like a mini library and can be separately viewed, sorted and searched. Other members can see your collections, on your profile and elsewhere. Features like member-to-member connection and book recommendations react to the new system as well. (See below on integration progress.)

As we offer users new flexibility, we avoid forcing members into "our" way of thinking about books. We've provided a number of default collections—Your library, Wishlist, Currently reading, To read, Read but unowned and Favorites. Data from these collections can be aggregated across all users, and their names are even translated on LibraryThing's non-English sites. But you can also create your own collections, and remove ours. And you can ignore collections entirely, keeping everything in "Your library."

A Work in Progress. As members know, we play things pretty fast and lose here. Our motto is "beta, forevah!" But collections had to be different. Before public release we subjected it to a month of testing in our large (and non-exclusive) BETA Group. We cannot thank that group enough for all the work they did, and the passion they showed.

We hope we got most of the major bugs, but the feature is not "finished"—and this is hardly the last blog post you'll see about the feature! Most significantly, collections is now mostly a "cataloging" feature, with only limited reach to other areas of the site. Although you can specify how collections affects member connections and recommendations—so you can stop having your Wishlist or for that matter your husband's books running the social and recommendation parts of the site—implementation is basic and, in light of extraordinary collections-related load, there's a lot of caching in place. We left a few features out in order to get it the main features out now.*

We also think "unfinished" (we prefer not prematurely specified) features are the best way to engage users, and get the best for everyone. Come and contribute on Recommended Site Improvements and Bug Collectors. We also have a Announcement post in New Features.

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*We had spec'ed out a complex interaction between reading-dates and "Currently reading." But the system was probably more than most members wanted. And it certainly was taking a long time to finish, so, for now at least "Currently reading" is just a collection.

Credits: Chris (conceptDawg) headed up the project, doing most of the user interface and a majority of the back-end code. Chris and I (timspalding) designed the feature together, and I did some core back-end code. Abby (ablachly) didn't code, but she dogged us about it for years. (I'm not sure what she's going to do with herself now.) But the most important factor was the members. Members, particularly the BETA group, contributed to the effort as I've never seen it—not in any website or project, ever. Chris and I owe members an enormous amount. (I'll be blogging about this specifically soon. It needs telling.)

Top photo by radiant_guy" (Flickr, CC-SA).

May Bonus batch of Early Reviewer books

This month we have a special bonus batch of Early Reviewer books! The May Bonus batch includes 7 books and a grand total of 185 copies to give out.

For a special treat, Random House is giving away books from two recent Pulitzer Prize winners. Jon Meacham for American Lion and Elizabeth Strout for Olive Kitteridge.

First, make sure to sign up for Early Reviewers. If you've already signed up, please check your mailing address and make sure it's correct.

Then request away! The list of available books is here:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list

The deadline to request a copy is Friday, June 5th at 6PM EST.

Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This batch of books can be sentonly to members in the US. Make sure to check the flags by each book to see if it can be sent to your country.

Thanks to all the publishers participating this month!

Random House	Open Letter
Ballantine Books	Graphic Arts Center Publishing Company

Flash-mob in South Carolina

This Saturday, May 30th, the Clemson Montessori School in Clemson, SC will host a flash-mob to catalog their library.

It will start at 9am and go until it ends (probably not later than 3pm). Arrive anytime before lunch and stay an hour or all day! The school will provide morning snacks, coffee, etc. and lunch for helpers.

204 Pendleton Road. Clemson, SC 29631 (just off of US 76).

The catalogers will be behind the white fence in the building nearest the soccer field.

There are lots of books to catalog and the library building has wireless internet so bring your laptops and join us. (We should also have limited access to a couple of desktop computers).

Please let Tricia know if you plan to come (or need more info) via a comment on her profile (hailelib or cmslib29631) or email at pwh@macatea.com

Better statistics, other improvements

I spent the weekend cooking up code, not sausages:

1. Series statistics. By popular demand, the member Series Statistics page can now show your series books you have in context of the complete series. (See talk post.)

2. Awards, characters and places. I've added similar statistics pages for three other "Common Knowledge" categories—Awards, Characters, Places. (See talk post.)

I also added series, awards, characters and places stats in your profile* and the "Your Zeitgeist" box on your home page (see talk post.)

3. More Green Checkmarks. Green check-marks, the mark that shows when you have a work, have spread further. They are now appearing on work-page recommendations, recommendation pages and in other members' catalogs. (See talk post.)

4. Power Edit gets better Previously, you could only Power Edit a page at a time (ie., no more than 100 books at a time). I added a feature to allow you to power-edit all the books in a given result set. So, you can do all your books, all the books that match a particular search, etc.



See the talk post.

5. Message Flagging. I've improved message-flagging in Talk, so that members can reverse their flagging, as well as counter-flag a message, if they think it was wrongly flagged. (See talk post.)

I also proposed making the Wikipedia policy "Assume good faith?" an official LibraryThing policy, triggering a lively debate about community norms, just what spam is and so forth. See the talk post.

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*Originally high, but I moved it down when members hollered.

Author interviews posted

Our first two author interviews, first seen in the revamped State of the Thing newsletter, are live on the site itself. The interviews are:

• Ayelet Waldman, author of Love and other Impossible Pursuits and now Bad Mother.
• Arthur Philips, author of The Egyptologist and now The Song Is You.

Abby and I enjoyed reading the books—we both read from Bad Mother (thumbs up, but it will tweak you), and Abby read The Song is You (thumbs up)*. Philips' interview convinced me I should check him out. "A child actor, a jazz musician, a speechwriter, a dismally failed entrepreneur, and a five-time Jeopardy champion" and a huge fan of Pale Fire? Will he come to our next party?

Want to do an author interview? Know someone who might? We're looking for authors, and we'd rather get great ideas from members than declare open-season on our inboxes from publisher PR types. Email abby@librarything.com about it.

We have a number of other things authors and publishers can "do" with LibraryThing on the about page. We'll be sprucing it up in time for Book Expo America in New York.

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*I think we have to stop saying if we liked a book, as we'll eventually read one we positively hate and "Check out this interview with Mr-Can't-Write" probably won't win us any friends.

State of the Thing

Our monthly "State of the Thing" newsletter just went out.

We "did it up," with a full HTML version and some special features. Notably, the May newsletter includes our first two author interviews:

Ayelet Waldman, author of the Mommy Track Mysteries, and now Bad Mother
Arthur Phillips, author of The Egyptologist and The Song is You

We ask penetrating questions like "Describe your library" and "Is your husband really that perfect?" We'll be doing more of them as time goes by, and making them available on the site generally.

For now, however, you can only get them in the newsletter. So if you want to get a copy, be sure to edit your account preferences. We'll send you out a copy soon after.

Compare your library with others'

I've added a new "Compare: Connections" feature, similar to the Legacy Library feature. But instead of munging statistics about Jefferson and Yeats, the new feature works on your friends, interesting libraries and other connections lists.

Members: find yours here.
Others: here are mine.

As with the Legacy Libraries page, you get a couple options. First, you choose which list you want to look at—friends and so forth. Then try:

• Shared books, books. Shows the most popular books you also share.
  
• Shared books, people. Shows all the connections, with how much they share.
  
• Top books. Shows the most popular books, whether or not you share them. It's a "Most Popular Books" for your friends and other connections.
  

I'm anticipating some time-outs on larger libraries. The calculations here are brutal—100MB of RAM is not atypical. I'll mitigate them tomorrow.

A feature for LibraryThing Authors. I've also added a small, but cute feature for LibraryThing Authors. In certain circumstances, LibraryThing Authors now get a "Your Readers" list, alongside their friends and so forth. Right now, these lists are appearing on all author and work pages—again, only if you are a LibraryThing author. They aren't showing up in the "Compare" feature because many authors have hundreds or thousands of readers, and the system can't handle all that calculation right now.

Talk about both features on this blog or here.

Who reads an author?

I've "brought back" top member lists on author pages, significantly enhancing them with lists that show the author's readers among your friends and connections, and among Legacy Libraries (eg., C. S. Lewis had a lot of Twain).

Also new, LibraryThing Authors now get a new "Your Readers" connections category, so they can find out what your readers think of a given author or work.



Discuss here

May Early Reviewer Books

The May batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We've got 61 books this month, and a grand total of 1,569 copies to give out.

First, make sure to sign up for Early Reviewers. If you've already signed up, please check your mailing address and make sure it's correct.

Then request away! The list of available books is here:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list

The deadline to request a copy is Friday, May 29th at 6PM EST.

Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the US, Canada and the UK. Make sure to check the flags by each book to see if it can be sent to your country.

Thanks to all the publishers participating this month!

Howard Books	W.W. Norton	HarperCollins
Canongate Books	Litwin Books	Tradewind Books
St. Martin's Griffin	The Permanent Press	Shambhala
WaterBrook Press	Leucrota Press	Newmarket Press
Henry Holt and Company	Crossway	Beacon Press
Scribner	Bantam	Touchstone
Knopf	Manic D Press	Doubleday Canada
St. Martin's Press	Raven Tree Press	Solutions
Delta	North Atlantic Books	Faber and Faber
Bell Bridge Books	Bloomsbury	Workman Publishing
South Dakota State Historical Society Press

London Book Fair

A few weeks ago I flew across the pond to speak at the London Book Fair. The panel* I was on focused on books and marketing in an online world. I talked about how traditional marketing is seen as just spam when it comes onto social networking sites (the "hi, want to be my friend? buy my book!" posts endear no one), and how authors need to genuinely participate and become part of the community online.

On LibraryThing, there are a number of ways for authors and publishers to become involved. I talked about Early Reviewers, of course, but also Author Chats, LibraryThing Local (add upcoming readings!), and our (upcoming) author interviews.

I spent the rest of the fair walking around to publisher booths, inviting them to join Early Reviewers. We have a majority of the big publishers in the US participating, but only a handful in the rest of the world. Part of this trip was to attempt to remedy that, one country at a time (if LibraryThing wants to fund an Abby world tour, that's fine by me)! I talked to many UK publishers, and hopefully we'll see some books available to more countries on the Early Reviewers lists soon!

And, of course, London was great fun. I'd only ever been to England on layovers before (meaning, I'd been to Heathrow, but not beyond the airport walls!). In the evenings I played tourist and walked all over the city. I only went inside a few places, but the highlight was definitely the underground The Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms.

*See Lance Fensterman's (my fellow panelist and director of BookExpo America) post about the panel here, and the moderator, Chad Post's here.