Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…
Thank you!For the link and for the support.Linked you back.Rachel
Cheers, Rachel. Glad to have been of service.
Okay, I’ll play.I suspect that the allure is a bit lessened for you, given that you have a mature library already, are adept at spotting what you do and do not like in books, and (I assume) can spend the time keeping up with newly released books to stay on top of things.On the other hand, I’ve got a modest and growing cookbook collection. I’d like to see what cookbooks other folks find important, and to peek at the rest of their collection to see if their general tastes line up with mine (or not). Also, there is a bit of a zeitgeist factor – among this particular community of users, what is popular at the moment? What’s freshly added? &c.It’s not quite as compelling as Flickr for the reason you mention – you can share a photo, but I’m going to have to go out and check out or purchase a copy of a book that I want. However, I expect that it’s much more cozy and human than the reader recommendations at Amazon, for example, and seeing full collections gives me more data to judge the credibility of a reviewer.That said, I haven’t registered or browsed the site in detail yet. I could be blathering on.
(It’s bad etiquette to reply to your own email, is it also the same for blog comments?)Also, I don’t think that the LibraryThing site is designed to be a full catalog, but more of a basic metadata repository geared towards peer recommendations. This is in contrast to BookCat, essentially an electronic catalog where you get to do all the typing. They’re meant for different purposes.
Mike, you make some good points. Whether LibraryThing is designed to be a full catalogue or not, it clearly isn’t at this point. BookCat wins hands down, even when I ignore the book-loaning features of BookCat. BookCat is also better at automatically populating a catalogue entry via online retrieval – I had over 600 failures when I supplied a list of my ISBNs to LibraryThing. As you say, it will probably come down to zeitgeist – if it works for me, then I’ll stick with LibraryThing, but if it’s the usual cacophony of crap (as Sturgeon predicts), then I’ll carry on with the usual channels.
Hi Geoff.I did indeed mean, as you surmised, that you add posts (very) regularly to your blog.Adding entries to a blog is of course what bloggers do, by definition. But by my calculations you wrote 30 posts last week and that turns out to be well above the blogging average (which is more like 5-ish).Long may it continue…
Ah, thanks DG for the enlightenment… One of the nicer things about being retired is that one has time to devote to things like blogging. One of the less nicer things is that one is getting closer to the point when one ceases to exist. Still, let’s look on the brighter side of life, shall we? 🙂
makes new section in my bookmarks (about time too!)
Serendipity strikes again!
You’ve got a nice edge to you. Use it. 
Geoff Coupe's Blog 
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