Week 8/Thing 19: Library Thing

I can't wait to show this to all the book lovers in my life! I see this as a HUGE rival to NoveList. I'd say NoveList vs. Library Thing is a perfect illustration of Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0. Library Thing is so amazing because you can read (and post) reviews, check out other people's bookshelves, get recommendations, and more. And of course it has the cool little widgets that bloggers love. Amazingly... with all it does... it's even easier to use than NoveList too. I'm impressed!

This is a tool that school librarians can easily use with students too, because it doesn't require any personal information to create an account. I briefly thought about creating a single demo account for the entire school (a "sandbox" account, one might say!) but so many varied users would really distort the bookshelf, and make recommendations difficult. Hmmmm. Also, it would quickly max out the number of books allowed in a free account.

One of the links in this assignment mentioned that some libraries are using the Library Thing widget to easily display new books on their web sites - I really like that idea! (Maybe I will go post it on the wiki!)

I did wonder about copyright - it's so easy to add a cover image from any old URL and can that be legal? I was in a blog on Library Thing where they said it's okay to link to amazon as long as you provide a link back to the site, but I thought amazon's policy was a bit more restrictive than that? (Although the cover I uploaded isn't showing in the widget - weird!)