Yesterday, I followed a link from Boing Boing to LibraryThing, this groovy online service that lets you catalog your book collection and share it with others. It uses tags like Flickr or MySpace, so other people can easily search your personal library and you can search theirs. Thus, the system doubles as a social network based around similar tastes in reading.
I thought the idea of a non-local catalog sounded like a good one — I’ve got a database of my movie collection on my home PC, but if the house burns down, I lose the record along with the collection — so I set up an account. So did one of my three loyal readers and frequent commenters, the inimitable Cranky Robert. Judging from the sporadic outages and slowdowns the site has been experiencing, so have a lot of other people. It’s one of those full-blown Internet fads, I tell you! Everybody’s doing it… so why aren’t you? Seriously, if you own a lot of books, you ought to go check it out.

(Incidentally, if you go to my catalog, you will notice that I haven’t yet entered very many titles. That’s because, as my profile page notes, I have a huge library that’s scattered all over the house, and, as with everything else I do, it requires time, of which I have precious little these days. Now that I think about it, maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. The last thing I need right now is another fracking project…)