One of our readers, Talya in Montreal, recommended we take a look at goodreads– and I have to say I’m impressed! I was hooked right away when I saw the banner on the homepage. I’m a design sucker (the same way I fall for book covers). But, this site has more than a nifty design.
After logging into the site you can invite some friends to join you. I’m hoping my sister will join because she’s a voracious reader and always has great recommendations. Once you have some friends register with the site you can get book recommendations from them. However, if you would rather not invite any friends to join you, you can also compare your tastes with strangers (who are sure to become your new best friends). Just browse around and see if there are any goodreaders with similar tastes and add them to your friend list. Next, rate some of your favorite books. (One of the drawbacks on this feature is that most books have multiple editions, so I’m wondering if I should just rate one edition or all of them?)
One of the coolest features of goodreads is the ability to create a widget and put it on your personal blog or website. I can see this website being very useful. I’m going to have to bookmark it and hope my friends, and sister, will join!
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I rather like this idea. I have quite a few friends living in other parts of the country, and even though I have a blog that includes book reviews, a lot of them don’t. I’m sure I could pull a few into it.
I’ve got to tell you that my sister logged on and reviewed 20 books. That’s huge! Ask anyone in my family, because her emails are sparse and at most, one sentence. For her to log on and spend that much time on a site is really saying something positive about the setup and usefulness to non-techie folks.
At first glance, it looks like LibraryThing, which is a lot of fun so far. I’m excited to find your blog, too - I’m building a wiki to help librarians build programs to introduce their staff to new technological concepts, particularly the “Web 2.0″ stuff. There’s a lot of different things out there, and it’s nice to read your explorations to find more things to explore on the wiki you can find it at http://instructionwiki.org/Library_2.0_in_15_minutes_a_day
Thanks!
sam