The Great UnSuggester

This, surely, is what technology was invented for:

Unsuggester takes "people who like this also like that" and turns it on its head. It analyzes the seven million books LibraryThing members have recorded as owned or read, and comes back with books least likely to share a library with the book you suggest.

After all, who wants to know about things that will slide down your mental gullet like a proverbial oyster? What we need are intellectual chicken bones that makes us choke on new ideas.

Squirl It Away - Forever, Please

A little while back I wrote about LibraryThing which lets you catalogue, tag and share information about your books. Obviously, it's a model that can be applied to other domains, and that's what the wittily-named Squirl has done. However, I'm not entirely sure we should be encouraging people to drag this kind of thing out into the harsh light of day.

It's a LibraryThing

Quite rightly, everyone raves about Wikipedia's million+ English-language articles as a monument of cumulative achievement. But in the background there's another major collaboration going on that's also talking telephone numbers: LibraryThing.

LibraryThing is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. You can access your catalog from anywhere—even on your mobile phone. Because everyone catalogs together, LibraryThing also connects people with the same books, comes up with suggestions for what to read next, and so forth.

and

LibraryThing is a full-powered cataloging application, searching the Library of Congress, all five national Amazon sites, and more than 45 world libraries. You can edit your information, search and sort it, "tag" books with your own subjects, or use the Library of Congress and Dewey systems to organize your collection.

If you want it, LibraryThing is also an amazing social space, often described as "MySpace for books" or "Facebook for books." You can check out other people's libraries, see who has the most similar library to yours, swap reading suggestions and so forth. LibraryThing also makes book recommendations based on the collective intelligence of the other libraries.

Recently, LibraryThing hit the six-million book mark; one knock-on consequence of this is that it includes works of even the most obscure writers.