the hidden library, the P2P library, recommendations, and gettin' it on

There was a post here, but TypePad does not protect posts from being lost when you accidentally try to surf away to another page (unlike blogger).  Now I have to try to recook the entire thing.  Bloody hell.

In the city, we live in our home entertainment pods and don't meet our neighbours.
Bill St. Arnaud just sent out today [CAnet - news] Get to know your neighbours through WiFi:

When Tony Guagliardo moved to Manhattan's East Fourth Street, he didn't know anyone in the neighborhood. Then one day, while trying to get wireless Internet in his apartment, he noticed an open Wi-Fi network named Neighbornode. He chose it, launched his browser, and a message board popped up welcoming him to the Fourth Street Avenue B Node. The network had been set up by a local resident who wanted to share his Internet connection. Soon, Tony's neighbors were using it to discuss local restaurants, a community art project and even the block's homeless guy, Eddie.

My idea was to make a wiki for my condo building (and I did in fact build a private demo), but the condo board doesn't seem at all interested.

Now one notable thing is that contrary to media blather about isolation, online is actually an engine for creating communities.  People naturally congregate around common interests.

One such of course is books.  Just like there is an Invisible Web of content unseen by search engines, there is a Hidden Library of books uncatalogued - people's home libraries.  Someone want to Google me up a stat on how many millions (billions?) of volumes that is?  Now unfortunately, we can't all be like Forrest J. Ackerman (no relation) whose vast personal collection, according to one show I saw, was eventually professionally catalogued.

And typing in the titles of several thousand books does not exactly appeal to most non-librarians.  But the web brings unexpected power.  Using Delicious Library, my Mac, and my Digital Video (DV) camera, I simply hold the book's ISBN barcode in front of the camera until DeLibrary beeps to tell me it has read the barcode.  Shortly thereafter, a computer synthesized voice reads me the book title, if it is successfully retreived from Amazon.ca ... and then I get a nice bookcover displayed on screen as well.

With this kind of technology, it is quite feasible for me to locally catalogue my entire collection (well, at least the books new enough to have a barcode).

Now imagine we move online.  In fact you don't have to imagine, because LibraryThing is in this space.  And we geocode your location with great precision... bring on the P2P library (in olden days, this was known as "loaning books to your friends").

Go to the app, it knows your location, type in a book search... "Bob has the book Guns, Germs, and Steel, he lives one block away from you and is willing to loan it".

Hmm... do we need a library at all then (just kidding).  Could your library enable this?  "The wait list for the book you have requested, Harry Potter and the Adolescent Hormones, is two weeks.  However, Sue who lives next door to you is willing to loan it right away."

Now, about recommendation services.  Oh poor recommendation service, trying to guess what I want from the few purchases I am able to afford on Amazon.ca  Plus which, I am not so keen on Amazon.ca knowing that I personally am reading such and such books.  Wishlist mining, anyone?  Amazon purchase mining?  Yeah, I want the Internet to know more about my mindspace...

What I would like is to be able to anonymously upload my entire personal library catalogue, and get recommendations based on that.  And of course the more catalogues that are uploaded, the more data the recommendation service has to work with...

Oh, and getting it on?  I ran across a story that students sharing their iTunes tracks in residence attracted err, positive reactions from other students.