Recently in Just for fun Category
A post on a Bibliographic Wilderness caused me to think of how to thread together a few services to share my reading with others. In fact that's what that post is about, sharing a reading list in the Web 2.0 way.
I don't really want (or expect) my friends to come to WorldCat.org to view my lists. (Though I would love it if they did! Hint, hint.) So I want to expose my list on other Web sites.
After a few minutes of poking around, I set things up to post a tweet to my Twitter stream whenever I add a new item to a WorldCat.org list. Because my Twitter account is linked to my Facebook profile and my FriendFeed page, I can share books, movies, articles and more with friends on many networks with one action on WorldCat.org.
Here's what I did:
- I copied the RSS feed from my list using the "view xml" option on the AddThis page which appears when you click the "RSS Feed" button on a list.
- I jumped to TwitterFeed.com and set up an account there.
- I stuck the RSS URL into a new feed on TwitterFeed.
- I set up some of the parameters on that TwitterFeed page, including a hash tag for #reading so I can pull together all of the stuff I've added using that tag
TwitterFeed took about 30 minutes to update, but once it did the most recent edition to my list appeared on Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed.
A super simple mashup of services without a lick of coding can thread content through your social networks. Try it and let me know how it works. Or better yet ... tell me some other ways this can be done!
Sure we're more than halfway through December, but this is interesting stuff and we can now start kicking these lists out on a regular basis.
Unsurprisingly, Stephanie Meyer's teen vampire series dominated the top 20 most viewed items on WorldCat.org for the month of November. The first three books from the series nabbed the #1, #4, and #10 spots as the film version of the first novel, Twilight, hit theaters last month.
The wizarding crowd maintained a foothold against the pubescent bloodsucker assault, with both Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and The Long Look making the list at #18 and #9 respectively.
In nonfiction news, biographies were strong with President-elect Barack Obama's Dreams from my Father hanging on to the #20 spot and Robert Zweig's Return to Naples grabbing the #12 position. Also in the top 20 were two books on intellectual property rights: No Trespassing: Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalization (#5), and Terms of Use: Negotiating the Jungle of the Intellectual Commons (#15).
View the full list (in no particular order) and, thanks to Wordle.net, here's a fancy-looking cloud of the subjects for the top 20 works:
Also, I'm taking guesses on where The Tale of Despereaux and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button end up in the top 20 for December, if they make the list at all. And no, don't click on the above links a thousand times to stuff the ballot box.
On second thought, go ahead and do that. And borrow them from your local library while you're at it. Good reads, the both of them.
In my family, you haven't lived until you've had a West Side Market smokie (not these Smokies, but these smokies...and, at least for the non-vegetarian types.)
The other day, I mentioned our annual after-Thanksgiving stop at Cleveland's West Side Market to Bob (knowing it is also one of his favorite places). Trips to the market around the holidays have been a tradition in my family for as long as I can remember - and from the stories my Babcia (my Polish grandmother) use to share, they have been for quite some time.
We thought it would be cool to check out what WorldCat could share about Cleveland's West Side Market, besides some interesting books, we found some really cool historic images of the market in WorldCat. To easily find digital images, just add "cntnt" to your search term; for example "Cleveland West Side Market cntnt."
What holiday traditions could you learn more about at WorldCat.org?
