‘Social networking for bookworms’: WSJ discovers LibraryThing–and spot-on tagging

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By David Rothman

You read here earlier about LibraryThing through which bibliophiles can share lists of their holdings.

Now, in a readable, well-researched article, the Wall Street Journal nicely sums up precise tagging–a key feature of LibraryThing:

“Tagging” is one of the more highly billed Web 2.0 concepts, a function that allows individual users to ascribe categories to online content. On LibraryThing, librarians tag the books in their own collections to create indexes far more vibrant than anything the Library of Congress could handle. The nation’s official repository, Mr. [Tim] Spalding [founder of LibraryThing] points out, has no equivalent to LibraryThing’s user-created “southern vampire” tag.

With the help of tags, genres become more precise and refined: Where the science-fiction section of a bookstore is overly broad, LibraryThing users can draw distinctions between “steampunk” and “cyberpunk.”

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