[Tagdb] LibraryThing guy

[Timothy Spalding]

Hello. I've been lurking for a while, and thought I might as well  
send a "hello" letter. My name it Tim Spalding. I developed  
LibraryThing.com ( http://www.librarything.com ) , a sort of  
"del.icio.us for books." (It's more than that, but that's the best  
short explanation here.) LibraryThing's been around for a little over  
three months and has some 1.1 million books cataloged (and 1.6  
million tags accumulated). There are Del.icio.us-like tag pages (eg.,  
http://www.librarything.com/tag/adventure ). Tags are also used in  
various suggestion algorithms, in tag clouds, tags related to  
authors, etc.

I'm minimally interested in the purely "technical" side of tagging,  
and even less in debates about folksonomy vs. ontology, etc. But I am  
interested in the algorithmic side—what cool things can be done, and  
how? How does one derive related tags? How does one compute the  
contaguinity (smile) between two taggers or tagged items? How can  
tags impact non-tags. Notably, LibraryThing has more types of data to  
draw on that some comparable services. Ideally, LibraryThing has all  
the books-based metadata in a librarian's Marc record—from author,  
series, original work and so forth to Dewey numbers, LC numbers and  
LC subject headings. How can tagging dance with other metadata and  
with professional classifications? I've done some work on all these,  
but it's been in a vacuum.

So, hello. I'd love to talk about these topics or others. If this  
isn't the right place, can anyone suggest another?

Tim Spalding / LibraryThing