kothari.ca

along the lines of same same but different is Netvibes, a “custom made web 2.0 home page solution” that i stumbled upon while bloglining (it was being used as an event planning aggregator — good idea!)

similar to SuprGlu, it aggregates your feeds in one convenient place, but different in that (1) it is private (2) it updates in realtime and (3) you can incorporate e-mail accounts, to-do lists, websearching and webnotes alongside RSS and ATOM feeds to blogs, flickr, del.icio.us, CiteULike, and a myriad of other sources. it also supports OPML files.

i especially like the built-in podcast player!

(okay, more different and less same same than SuprGlu)

today my head is in the clouds. in the tag clouds.

tags, aka freeform keywords, are everywhere. del.icio.us, flickr, technorati, LibraryThing, 43 things, and so on.

TagCloud beta creates personalized tag clouds from your favourite blogs’ RSS feeds by analyzing posts and fetching keywords. here is my first experimental cloud (the links tend to load sloooooowly):

in related news, del.icio.us now has a tagroll feature which pulls your custom-coloured tags onto your blog for one-click access to your bookmarks:

i have now “tagged” over 300 books in my bibliogoddess library. after the first 200 books, which i added for free, i gave in to the madness and upgraded to a LibraryThing lifetime unlimited account!

a couple of comments on the search feature:

:: the book search does not return results for words of less than 4 letters. while this prevents searches for stop words like “the” it also does not allow searches for legitimate words (e.g. “tea” yields no results — i have 4 books with “tea” in the title).

:: the book search and tag search only do exact match searches — this means that if someone is checking my catalogue for a book they think is titled or tagged as artist, but is actually listed as artists, the book will not be found. entering art will only return art, not artist and artists.

despite these search quirks — quirks because i want people to be able to find the book if i have it — i am happy having my library searchable and browseable online. i have even added a borrowed tag so i know what is checked out, and to whom!