Socialogue
I am interrupting our current series for a shameless advertisement. For the past few months my brother and I have been working on producing a website that will allow people to socially bookmark their libraries of books, music, and videos. We are finally to a point where I can announce our site to a larger audience. I have given it the Steve Hays-esque name Socialogue [http://www.socialogue.com/]. Our site is entirely free and does not have any usage restrictions. Users may store as many items in our site as they desire.
My goal is to get as many reformed readers signed up as possible. The real value of this tool lies in its ability to recommend items to you based on your current library. The tool also finds similarities between items. In order to take further advantage of these capabilities, I hope to have a bibliography creator implemented within the week. This feature will ask visitors to type in keywords and/or select a few books so the tool will be able to build a formatted bibliography of related books. I believe this will turn out to be a very useful tool for research. However great this sounds, these features presuppose a corpus of similar items, which is why I am announcing this on Reformata.
We have tried to implement features that make Socialogue as user-friendly and useful as possible. For those privy to music, we can import data from an iTunes music library. Personally, I use the site to keep track of all the books I loaned out over a year ago that have yet to be returned.
Take a look at Socialogue. And if you have any bibliophile or audiophile friends, let them know we are up and running.
Have you heard of LbraryThing? It’s only 1 year old but it’s growing. Check them out at librarything.com. You can enter 200 of your books for free.
Comment on February 27, 2006 @ 9:43 am
I’ve added one book. Hmmm. I wonder if there’s a way that socialogue can get the isbns from my librarything.com catalogue…
Comment on February 27, 2006 @ 9:50 am
The reason I created socialogue was because LibraryThing had a 200 book limit on free accounts. I signed up but quickly filled up my 200. I was a little frustrated with some of the features at LibraryThing too. It doesn’t allow you to catalog music or movies. I’m working on a LibraryThing import that would let users have a one-time quick import of their data. This would ease the pain of switching for those with large libraries.
Comment on February 27, 2006 @ 9:54 am
Camden,
Yes, it costs money to have your entire collection on LibraryThing. One good thing with them however is that they allow you to be the Amazon Associate when a viewer clicks on of your books and is taken to Amazon’s site.
I read somewhere on their blog about why they are focused solely on books. Let me see if I can find it.
Comment on March 1, 2006 @ 3:48 am
Camden,
Thanks for creating this! I’ve started entering some of my books and am excited about its potential. As I’m still in the “library-building” stage (will that ever end?), I look forward to seeing the recommendations made based on my current set of books, etc.
Grace to you,
Tom
Comment on March 1, 2006 @ 11:09 am
Hello,
I have been helping out Camden with this website for a few months now. It’s great to see how far it has come and the enormous potential that I believe it has. Camden mentioned that he was working on a LibraryThing.com importer. That feature is currently up and running, so switching over and trying out Socialogue isn’t as painful as it was before. We’ll get some type of help document or tips section up there in the future to facilitate the process.
Thanks,
Kelly
Comment on March 2, 2006 @ 1:00 am
Kelly, I clicked the “choose” button in the “Import from LibraryTHing” area. It’s looking for something on my harddrive. Shouldn’t it ask for our LibaryThing username? How do we use this feature?
Comment on March 3, 2006 @ 3:43 am
Are you looking for Reformed Socialoguers only?
Comment on March 3, 2006 @ 3:44 am
jc,
When you’re importing from LibraryThing, you have to export their data first. To do that, log in to LibraryThing and click “Extras” at the top of the page. Once you’re in there, you can click “Export all records as text” in the center green box. This will prompt you to download the file you will need for Socialogue’s import.
Comment on March 3, 2006 @ 6:50 am
We’re not looking for reformed people only, but it would be nice to get a base of like-minded people at first. The power of this site comes out when we have a large group of people with similar tastes.
Comment on March 3, 2006 @ 6:51 am
I’ll put some documentation up later today on that feature.
Comment on March 3, 2006 @ 9:47 am
The help documentation is up. There will be a link called “help” right under the file field.
Comment on March 3, 2006 @ 10:30 am
re: post 18. Perhaps we can choose to mark ourselves as “Reformed” so that if others come along, we can still do similarity-checking with only those users who’ve marked themselves as Reformed.
Yikes. For some reason, this ideas spooks me a bit.
Comment on March 7, 2006 @ 4:37 am
jc,
I understand where you’re coming from. I’m working on a few advanced methods of clustering similar people together for use in recommendations, etc. However, you can create a network of people you would like to keep tabs on. Just click “Network” up at the top and search for a user to add. In the future we’ll use the network in screening items for recommendations and the like.
We have set up a Socialogue blog at blog.socialogue.com if you would like to keep up to date on what’s going on. I might set up a discussion board as well.
Comment on March 7, 2006 @ 7:30 am
Regarding post number 2 above (http://blog.solagratia.org/2006/02/27/socialogue/#comment-250), I still can’t find the reason as to why LibraryThing has focused solely on books, but it doesn’t matter anymore. Because they are going to allow CDs and DVDs to be catologued soon.
Wow! Since their launch 7 months ago, LibraryThing.com has 2Million books catalogued. Let’s see how socialogue does. I’m sure reformed readers are a people group that reads a lot.
Comment on March 17, 2006 @ 7:06 am