The Long Tail of Ann Coulter

Here is are two charts showing the distribution of customer tags on Amazon.com for Ann Coulter's Godless: The Church of Liberalism. The first shows tags 1-25; the second all 881 tags.




The distribution is not too far from the classic "long tail" pattern common to social data. Although the common tags are common, fully 75% of the tags are used only once.

It's an even better example of another characteristic of social data, that "user generated content" is all about context, not just object. LibraryThing members and Amazon customers are tagging the same book. But while, on LibraryThing, where you have to have a book to tag it, Godless has a fairly unremarkable tag cloud, touching on its subject matter and point of view, on Amazon, the tagging has devolved into a shouting match. I don't think the people who tagged the book "asshat," "vomit" or "w h o r e" are using tagging as a memory aid ("I forget—what books did I think are 'asshat' anyway?"). They're using tagging as a sort of drive-by review.

Now, a case can be made that Amazon's tags are signaling something important—this is a "controversial" book indeed! The LibraryThing tag cloud doesn't show that as starkly. On balance, however, I think opinion tags corrupt the value of tagging. 

Either way, I think this example demonstrates that tagging isn't a simple matter of putting users in front of taggable stuff.

Penn Libraries make movies

Penn Libraries have put out a series of library movies: LibClips.* They are simultaneously terrifying and dangerously hysterical. The musical numbers take the cake, in my opinion.

You must go watch them now.

My favorites:
"Get it with BorrowDirect+" (he harmonizes with himself!)
"Find it a Click Away" (who hasn't wished they were a floating head before? Man, can I relate)

Finally, I appreciate the captioning at the bottom. Makes karaoke easier.

But where is the aria for PennTags?

*hat-tip, my friend Adrienne

Best Venn diagram

The popular website Very Short List picked up our I See Dead People's Books / Legacy Libraries for its daily feature. Great stuff.

Our Legacy Librares include such luminaries as Thomas Jefferson, Sylvia Plath and Tupac Shakur.

VSL gives all of its stories a funny Venn diagram. I love ours!

The Algorithm, Doctorow, Fungus

"The Algorithm" made two assumptions about me, one very flattering and one not.

First, Facebook believes that I may "know" author and internet hero Cory Doctorow.

Perhaps Mr. Doctorow actually knows some people I "know" on Facebook (but don't actually know). That's possible. Or maybe it's just flattering me.

Meanwhile, Google's GMail algorithm thinks I have toenail fungus.



I can usually figure out why Google is serving me up an ad. Read an email from Abebooks and it serves up flights to Victoria, Canada, where they have their headquarters.

But I don't know what confluence of keywords suggested this. Was it my wife telling me about Liam's swim class? We all know pool dressing rooms are fungal paradises. Anyway, it has me worried. Google has some powerful technology. Maybe I have do have toenail fungus!

Oh, and check out the end of the ad, "Written by a well known auther." Ouch.

Bhutan does the LibraryThing

Casey just added access to the National Library of Bhutan, the tiny and reclusive Himalayan nation. Bhutanese bibliophiles, come on in!

So, what record format do you think is employed by the National Library of Bhutan, a consecrated Buddhist temple housing a collection of mostly classical Tibetan manuscripts? Go ahead and think about it... It's DanMARC2, the Danish variant of MARC21. What?!

Apparently the Danish Royal Library is deeply involved with its Bhutanese brother through a so-called Library Twinning Project. You learn something new every day.

Two LibraryThing podcasts

John Houser of PALINET interviewed me for the PALINET Podcast (iTunes). It ended up syndicated as two short podcasts. I think they're some of the best short introductions to LibraryThing for librarians and of our project, LibraryThing for Libraries.

• Part one. "In Part 1 of our conversation, we talked about LibraryThing generally and what you can do with it."
• Part two. "In Part 2 of our conversation, we talked about LibraryThing for Libraries, achieving a critical mass of tags, and improving discovery in the library catalog."

PALINET's podcasts are my newest discovery--that and Uncontrolled Vocabulary. Recent shows include The WorldCat API and an interview with Joshua Ferraro of LibLime.

Why I don't work for a big organization

Tweet from a librarian I know:

"It amazes me that organizations skimp on the cheap stuff (disk space) and expect us to use our labor hours to tweeze through our inboxes."

I remember this was true at Houghton Mifflin, the Boston publisher where I worked. HM's installation of Lotus Notes gave us each only so much space. As the guy responsible for pulling together their ebooks*, my inbox was full of large files. I was perpetually up to my chin in water.

But this was six years ago, back when, although you knew what terabyte was, it sounded as far off as terraforming Mars or, say, a petabyte. That six years of Moore's law and the ready example of Gmail has smart, valuable people like picking through messages in her inbox to save space depresses to me no end.

Maybe I'm just touchy, but I have decided to NEVER suffer this kind of thing again. Because it's never just one thing, but a whole set of interlocking inflexibilities and ineptitudes that sap the spirit and undermine contentment and productivity. So I hope that LibraryThing has given me enough professional mojo that, even if it fails, I can choose to never again do computer work for an organization that doesn't understand computers.

*It looks like they're still using most of my code. It was cool in, um, 2001, anyway.

"Library 2.0 Gang" discusses Google Book Search API

Here's a quick heads-up for those interested in the Google Book Search API. Talis' new "Library 2.0 Gang," of which I will be an occasional member, covered the topic. 

Importantly, they managed to get someone from Google, Frances Haugen, in on the call. Ms. Haugen was diplomatically non-committal about the terms of service, but telegraphed benign latitude.

I ended up talking too much (what's new), but I did surface the most interesting thing about the GBS API for Libraries: using their API to add free covers to the OPAC, and the rise of JavaScript-based OPAC enhancements. I covered the former here. The latter is also take-away from LibraryThing for Libraries. 

Check it out here.