Thing 27 Library Thing

This week's next task focused on Library Thing. It's a site to catalog your personal book collection and share it with other users. Described as the myspace or facebook of book cataloging. Details here:

http://vbpl2point0.blogspot.com/2008/01/thing-27-take-look-at-librarything-and.html

I've heard about LibraryThing before---a friend uses it avidly and loves it. The organized part of me likes it, but I don't know if I like it enough to pay the fee to catalog my personal book collection (which is certainly more than the 200 items LibraryThing allots for free). Yet another social networking outlet to suck my time up.

So, I've played around with LibraryThing. Sign up (yet another account to worry about!) was pretty easy, and you're not required to provide more than a userid and password that you want. Adding materials wasn't that hard, but not the most intuitive. I tagged the items before finding out there was a certain way to do them. It's harder to find items that have different editions or are out of print. Though, I found that you can add an item and then edit the info later. I was able to find user-submitted images that matched the editions I had. I've been having trouble adding a link to my blog and don't find that aspect user friendly at all.

Kind of neat for the organizer in me but don't know if I'd actually use it after Learning 2.0.