Tag Mirror

(large, legible version here)

I have been pretty diligent at adding new books to my LibraryThing catalog (old stuff, not so much, there's only so much time in a day), especially since my library feeds into my sidebar (on the main, index page), and since I have a :cueCat scanner that performs the data input for me. However, I have not been so diligent about adding tags. Just lazy I guess, as I do try to tag my Flickr photos (helped by Adriaan Tijsseling's freeware 1001 program which remembers previously used tags).

The geniuses at LibraryThing have added a new feature:

Tag Mirror: See your books the way others do:


A major publisher recently asked us to show them a tag cloud of their books. It took a mental flip, but only a few lines of code to adapt this for individual use.

The result is Tag Mirror, available from your and everyone's profile... If you're signed in, here's yours. (Please note: It takes serious processing power to analyze 22 million tags. Everyone is going to hit it at once, so be patient.)

Tag Mirror “holds a mirror” up to your books and to you. Instead of showing what you think about your books—what a regular tag cloud shows—it shows you what others think of them, in effect using LibraryThing's twenty-two million tags to organize and surface interesting topics from within your own collection.** As with other tag clouds, size equals importance. When you click on a tag, you get a relevancy-ranked list of books tagged that way.

I can't decide if it's just the sort of cherry-on-top feature that makes LibraryThing unique or if it's something genuinely new and interesting. I think it might be the latter. As Altay put it, it's the sort of idea that seems obvious in retrospect
...
Finally, Tag Mirror gives everyone a tag cloud, even those who don't bother to tag anything. It seems almost unfair.

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