Simon Hammond Blog

I’ve come across a few sites where you can list your book collection (notably reader2 and allconsuming) but none of them held my interest longer than a dozen books. LibraryThing seems to have cracked this by:

• Making entering books super easy. You can enter random words from the title and author all together. Or, if you can the book handy, you can flip it over and just type in the ISBN. If you are seriously going to enter a lot of books then this is essential. You can even get a cheap bar-code scanner.
• Having an attractive site with a straightforward structure. It’s nice to look at and fun to explore. It feels like a friendly book/coffee shop rather than a research library desk.
• Providing a wealth of essential and quirky features. If something better than librarything comes along, I need to be able to export my work. I would also very much like to display books on my own site. The zeitgeist page shows me far more than I could possibly try to digest. Nevertheless, it’s fun to wallow in the stats.

For up to 200 books it’s free, which seems fair. I’m still entering books but you can check my shelf out. It’s slow since most of them are in boxes right now.

Why do this? Partly because I like being able to organise my books. Mainly because, having entered the books, I can get spot-on suggestions for future reading. As LT grows, the value of it’s database becomes significant and I imagine Amazon would love to get their hands on it. Their usual recommendations are crude at best. LT has suggested book at my first glance that I would be happy to stump up for right now.

Tags: unfiled by si
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Though not as embedded as some, I have spent rather a lot of time in academia. As such, I was interested in the provocative statements in The Decline and Fall of the British University.

In an age where books were scarce, communication was difficult and people who could read and write were almost as rare as the books, it made sense to centralise the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge. If you wanted to learn you headed towards where the books were and the people who could read them and that meant the great universities like Paris and Oxford. Poor communication, expensive reading materials and illiteracy were the foundation blocks for the universities. If today we have excellent communications, free online information and general literacy, we also have an environment in which the universities are struggling to maintain their position.

In the face of this change, British universities are still largely marketing themselves as providers of privilege and mind-broadening experiences. The former selling point is losing weight with the emphasis shifting to the latter. I think the market forces will ultimately cause the product to be updated as students, wary of debt, look for more efficient and flexible ways to learn. MIT and the OU are leading the way here.

Tags: PhD, unfiled by si
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I just came into a load of free time.  As such, I need a good way to organise all my new possibilities; a to-do list if you will.  From before, I remembered: remember the milk.

This was good before with a sound structure and easy interaction but it’s since added a couple of features that make me think I’ll be using it a lot in the future.

1.  I can use it from my mobile.  Surprisingly important if you don’t lug a laptop or PDA around.
2. I can use it from my personalised google homepage.  This means it’s going to pop into sight every time I fire up my browser.

This is on top of sharing, tagging, IM reminders and a bunch of other stuff.

Tags: review, web by si
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