Doug Cornelius .com

A few weeks ago I started comparing LibraryThing, GoodReads and Shelfari to see which one was the best for tracking books online: Tracking Your Books and Library Online. Since I want to read more books this year, I thought it would be good to check out these sites.

I’ve been using LibraryThing for two years and I thought I would take a look at the other two to see if they have caught up. I published my results over at GeekDad: Catalog Your Books Online.

LibraryThing is still on top, but GoodReads offers an interesting alternative.

Here are some of my other GeekDad posts:

• 10 Things Parents Should Know About The Princess and the Frog
• Data Privacy Day is January 28
• A Visit to the Patee House Museum
• Go-Go Kidz Travelmate Lets You Go Go Through the Airport

Here is a collection of posts from my professional blog: Compliance Building.

Compliance Bits and Pieces for January 29

Here are some interesting stories from the past week: French Supreme Court Limits the Scope of the Whistleblowing Process by Cecile Martin in the Privacy law Blog For the first time the French Supreme Court addressed the issue of the validity of a Code of conducts that had been implemented by a listed company. Read more »

Governing Social Media: How to Monitor, Manage and Make the Most of Employee Use of Social Media

Join me, Kathleen Edmond, Chief Ethics Officer, Best Buy, and Janice Innis-Thompson, SVP & Chief Compliance Officer, TIAA-CREF, as we discuss compliance and governance issues of web 2.0 and social networking. “Corporate Communication takes on a whole new meaning in a world of social media, where employees can freely post their views and spread documents,… Read more »

The Economist Special Report on Social Networking.

January 28, 2010

“An astonishing amount of time is being wasted on investigating the amount of time being wasted on social networks.” I love reading The Economist because of lines like that. The January 28 issue has a special report on social networking. (The cover image is Steve Jobs dressed like Moses with his new tablet) “Another , by… Read more »

Tax on Carried Interest? Maybe Not.

January 28, 2010

Tucked into the Tax Extenders Act of 2009 (H.R. 4213) was a provision targeted at partnership interests held by partners providing services. H.R. 4213 flew through the legislative process of the House of Representatives. It was introduced on December 7, 2009 and passed by the House on December 9, mostly along party lines. Read more »

More on Data Privacy Day

January 28, 2010

Today is International Data Privacy Day. Massachusetts Recognizes Data Privacy Day 2010 and touts the the new data security regulations. Disney has enlisted Phineas and Ferb to help guide your kids through cyberspace and teach them about the rules of the road on the internet. Google published their guiding privacy principles and published a video discussing them:… Read more »

Data Privacy Day is January 28

January 28, 2010

Data Privacy Day is an annual international celebration to raise awareness and generate discussion about information privacy. Last year, both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives recognized January 28th, 2009 as National Data Privacy Day. Intel, Microsoft, Google, AT&T, LexisNexis and The Privacy Projects are sponsoring Data Privacy Day efforts, with assistance from… Read more »

Hayek vs. Keynes Rap Anthem “Fear the Boom and Bust”

January 27, 2010

For you economics geeks, how about a rap duel between John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek? In Fear the Boom and Bust, John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek, two of the great economists of the 20th century, come back to life to attend an economics conference on the economic crisis. Before the conference… Read more »

Blue Collar or White Collar

January 27, 2010

Undercover agents, wire taps and search warrants. For a criminal case it sounds like your typical organized crime investigation. You would expect the indictment to have charges for drug dealing, racketeering, murder or something similar. But last week we heard that these were the techniques used to catch the 22 people indicted for violations of… Read more »

FINRA Issues Guidance on Social Networking Sites

January 26, 2010

Securities firms and brokers have been looking for guidance on how they can use social networking sites. Actually most industries have been trying to figure out what they can and cannot do with these sites. The difference is that the FINRA limitations on communicating with the public make it very difficult to use the… Read more »

Global Ethics Summit Update

Dow Jones and Ethisphere Institute are teaming up to present the 2010 Global Ethics Summit on February 23-24, 2010 at the Grand Hyatt New York City. I will be attending, thanks to an offer from the event’s organizers. If you are interested in attending I can offer you a 15% discount on regular conference fees,… Read more »

But Everyone Else is Doing it

GoodReads versus LibraryThing versus Shelfari

Back in 2008, I started looking at ways to catalog my household’s book collection: Books and Knowledge Management. LibraryThing was the winner. That decision was largely driven by their ability to manually enter books. Back in 2008 GoodReads and Shelfari libraries were limited to books listed on Amazon.com.

Since then, I have happily been using Library Thing. I have entered over 1,200 books in my LibraryThing catalog. About 300 of those books are more than 50 years old, meaning they are not available on Amazon.com.

It’s been about two years so I decided to take another look at my options. LibraryThing has been good to me, so I am hesitant to move. I suspected that there would be a great deal of time trying to recreate my catalog on another site.

Import and Export

All three have the ability to import and export books. So I exported the lists to Shelfari and GoodReads. I ended up with 1082 in Shelfari after manually adding 100 or so books. Shelfari made me go through a painful process of adding books by matching covers, with only 20 books per page. I gave up a third of the way through. I did not manually enter any books in Goodreads and ended up with 967 books.

Visuals

Back in 2008, Shelfari had the best visuals of the three. Unfortunately, it looks like time stopped for Shelfari. I did not notice any change in its visuals. The site  shows the book covers sitting on a wood grain bookshelf.

LibraryThing is the least attractive of the three. But it seems to have forgone good visuals for a user interface full of information. I found it the easiest to use, but I had the most familiarity with it.

GoodReads has the best looking user interface of the three.

Tags, Shelves and Collections

One of the keys is how the sites allow you to organize the books. For me, I have two basic pieces of data. The first is the reading status: read it or planning to read it. The second is whether I own it or not. Essentially I want to track the books I’ve read and the books I own in one place.

LibraryThing uses “collections” that work well for my basic data. The collections are not exclusive, so books can be in multiple collections. My collections are currently reading, publisher provided, reviewed, read but unowned, and to read. The LibraryThing also allows for extensive use of tags.

Goodreads allows many “shelves.” I set up currently reading, to-read, borrowed, and publisher provided. For some reason, your ownership status for a book is separate from the shelves. There is no separate tagging.

Shelfari limits your “shelves” to reading status, own, favorite and wish list. Instead, they allow lots of tagging.

Mobile Views

All three have a stripped down mobile view of their sites. Of the three, GoodReads has the most functionality squeezed onto the small iPhone screen, yet it still very readable.

Community

All three sites about their active network of users sharing information about books.  I had very few connections on the sites. Lots of connections on one of the sites would be a good reason to selection that site.

Integration with Other Applications

Goodreads has a nice tie into Twitter and Facebook allowing you update you books status to those sites. I really like this feature.

LibraryThing and Shelfari both have Facebook applications but they are far behind GoodReads.

Widgets

All three sites allow you to use widgets to show part of your collection.

LibraryThing had the most widgets and an ability to customize those widgets.

Cost

All three sites are free.

LibraryThing requires you to buy a membership if you want to keep more than 25o books in your catalog. I bought the $25 lifetime membership.

GoodReads and Shelfari both display advertisements.

What’s Next?

Going forward for the next months, I am going to use all three site and try to replicate the information. (although, I’m not going to spend much time going back to clean up my catalogs in GoodReads or Shelfari.) The stack of books next to my nightstand has gotten nearly as tall as my kids. So I have an itch to  cram in a bunch of book reading this year to clear out my backlog.

I will publish a follow-up in a few months and let you know which site won the competition.

In the meantime, if you are using any of the sites let me know your thoughts and connect with me.

• Doug on LibraryThing
• Doug on GoodReads
• Doug on Shelfari

Dave, Matt, Ken and Doug

Last Saturday afternoon was GeekDad day at the Wired Holiday Store in New York City.

I played chicken with the weekend blizzard and traveled down to New York City for the day. It is not often that the GeekDad contributors, strewn across the U.S. (and the U.K.), are able to get together in person. So the stakes were high.

As of Friday night, the powerful winter storm was moving slow. It was hitting Washington hard. But it looked like it would hold off on covering Boston with the white stuff until late Saturday night. It looked like I could get down to New York and back, beating the snow.

The trip down was uneventful, but I could see the storm clouds just south of New York City.

Ken Denmead, the editor of GeekDad, had hosted the first GeekDad on December 2. See Ken’s post: GeekDad Day at the Wired Holiday Store FTW.

Ken came back from the west coast, along with Matt Blum, the assistant editor, and Dave Giancaspro. Matt escaped Washington just before the blizzard hit that area. Dave was just a subway ride away.

We ran some LEGO building contests to give away prizes to a group of enthusiastic kids and their parents. The winning builders walked away with LEGO Star Wars Hyena Droid kits Bomber, copies of LEGO Star Wars: The Visual Dictionary, MythBusters Weird World of Water kits, and Mythbusters DVDs.

You can see more images from the day in my photo album: GeekDad at the Wired Holiday Store.

By the afternoon, the snow was upon us. Ken’s airline called him to let him know that his flight on Sunday morning was canceled, but they would be happy to re-book his flight for Friday. (FRIDAY!)

For me, I went to Penn Station and saw carnage. The Northbound trains from NYC to Boston come out of Washington and they were not getting out. I re-booked from the 7:00 train to the 3:00 train since the 3:00 had not yet arrived. I though that was clever until I sat down across from a very tired gentleman who was still waiting for the 2:00 train. This looked bad.

Upstairs, Megabus was willing to get me to Boston for $20 and claimed that the buses were running on time. The weather forecast for Boston called for the storm to hold off until midnight, the Boston arrival time for that bus. I had visions of the bus getting stuck in a blizzard in Connecticut or sliding off the road. That’s the reason I booked the train trip. Of course, when I went back down into Penn Station I had visions of not getting home at all by train.

I crossed my fingers and jumped on the bus.

The roads in the city were snowy. I-95 was snowy. Those visions of being trapped on the highway in a blizzard came back.

But then we turned north onto I-91 and the snow disappeared. We had blacktop and highway speeds all the way to Boston. Sure enough the snowflakes started in Boston right at midnight just as I arrived home.

It’s like the song was written for them.

Here are links to my Compliance Building posts from the past week:

Enterprise 2.0 – The Book

At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, Andrew McAfee handed out a few copies of this new book: Enterprise 2.0. I was one of the recipients of a shiny new copy with his autograph on the cover page.
If you have heard of Enterprise 2.0, they you have heard of McAfee.

How Fraudsters Try to Look Legitimate

The SEC is putting its new investor-focused website to good use: Investor.gov.
The first item that caught my eye was their article on how fraudsters use fake SEC registrations and bogus seals to make them look legitimate: Fake Seals and Phony Numbers: How Fraudsters Try to Look Legit.

Lately I have been experimenting with Four Square, a location-based social networking platform. For me, adding the geographic component of social networking adds another serendipity factor to the web 2.0 movement.

Serendipity of location.

“What’s Happening” + “Where are you”

It allows you to explore tools to create meeting chances. We have already seen Twitter add a location feature to its platform. [Location, Location, Location.]

Four Square does a similar thing, but adds a fun factor to disclosing your location. You get badges for going to many places. You also get the title of “Mayor” at a location if you have visited that place more than any other Four Square participant.

I have to admit that Four Square brings out my competitive streak. I have been stacking up mayor titles by mixing up my morning coffee stops. Four Square is still new so it does not take much to become mayor at many locations.

I tried out BrightKite in the past, but found its user interface to be a bit clunky. I also found its database of locations to be inaccurate, with no way to add it or change it. It’s been a while since I’ve use BrightKite so it may have improved since then.

I found Four Square to be much simpler and easy to use. It has a nice link to Twitter. Even better, it is easy to turn the Twitter notification off or on each time you check in at a location.

Sign up for Four Square and give it a try. This is me: http://foursquare.com/user/dougcornelius

Scoble’s take on Four Square:

• Foursquare: will it be bigger than Twitter?
• The biggest things last week: Foursquare and Salesforce