This was another one of those complex "Things." So many sites to look at; so many tools to try out. It was quite impressive to find all this stuff in one basket. Here's a quick summary of what I looked at and checked out:
Lib.rariou.us (Book organization site)
I found this site a bit hard to use, as it's not intuitive. For example, I don't get the ASIN thing at all. What is it? Why is it necessary, and how come you have to figure out that clicking in the box is the only way to make it work? Liked the tag cloud, though.
Twitterlit (Phone application)
I added this to the blog, just for fun. Can't see much use for it, however.
Reading Trails (Reader's advisory site)
I liked the concept of this site: creating or following a theme and adding/changing it to suit your tastes. Nonetheless, I found the search engine to be pretty balky. Also, like most of the sites on this "Thing," the "help" content was either nonexistent or hardly useful.
Overbooked (Online book community)
This is a good site. I like the idea of finding reviews via searching by title or author, or browsing a number of ways, including genres and themes. The only aspects I found funky about the site are the links to downloadable Excel files (how 20th century is that!) and that there are no links from discovered titles to sites like Amazon.
Wired for Books (Book group resource)
Cool site. It's great to have access to author interviews through MP3s.
Podiobooks (Audio book site)
Another excellent idea for a site, with great accessibility: MP3 content available as an RSS feed or by direct download. Pretty cool.
BookMooch (Book swap site)
This a nifty concept: a Netflix for books. Just search or browse for a book, put it on your want list, get it and mail it off again when you're done. Or make your own books available in the same way. Pretty slick, with even a point system to keep things fair for all.
A final note:
None of my comments dealt with the 2.0 functions of the sites I reviewed. I guess there's a couple reasons for this:
1. I'm not a big 2.0 person. I like being able to access content like book reviews or MP3 files of author interviews, but, frankly, I'm not really interested in what other people have to say about such things.
2. You need to sign up for most of these sites or become a member to access the 2.0 aspects. I really didn't feel like joining yet more websites at this time. So many passwords; so little time.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment