Thanks to the kindness of ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
firecat, I now have a DreamWidth account. It’s currently just a placeholder in case of a migration from LiveJournal. (I’m crossposting from DreamWidth right now; 
mithriltabby is 
slothman.)
As to the new appellation “mithriltabby”, I’ve been using it for increased uniqueness, since it seems I’m not the only Slothman or Catslaugh out there. To stake my claim on the name, this time I nabbed the vanity domain, which I’m using as my new home page.
The posting mechanism via the LJ Bot there is very rudimentary: you can control the subject, and provide one line of text, and that’s it. No icon, no friends-locking, no line continuation to do an extended post, no mood or music or location or tags.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
obsessivewoman got me a handy piece of software called ReaderWare for my last birthday, which can use a CueCat bar code scanner to identify books, music, and videos. In a fit of getting organized, I used it to catalogue my CD collection and my video collection. With those lesser tasks accomplished, I turned to cataloguing all the books in Maine Coon Manor. Turns out that the two of us have accumulated over 6,000 of them.
Last year, hypothermya introduced me to a rather interesting Web 2.0 site called LibraryThing. I had a go at entering a few books, but I just didn’t have the stomach for the daunting task of entering it all by hand. After getting my 3000+ works of fiction into the ReaderWare database, though, I checked back at LibraryThing, and discovered that they have a bulk upload feature that takes ISBNs. So I dumped the whole database up there.
ISBNs are not entirely unique identifiers, so it’s necessary to go over these things with a fine tooth comb. I’ve also been collecting relevant hyperlinks such as author home pages, weblogs, and wikipedia pages, though those are only in my ReaderWare database as there’s no useful way to put them on LibraryThing as yet. And I’ve finally finished my first pass through my fiction section, and I think I have at least 99% of the books in the house now in the database. (Next thing to do is to start tagging all the works that have won or been finalists for various awards.)
You can look at my LibraryThing profile, see the linear catalogue, or try the author cloud or tag cloud as alternative ways of navigating the collection. Feedback from my manga-literate friends on the manga collection is particularly welcome; I’ve been going by Wikipedia’s notions of shōnen and shōjo, but would appreciate the insight of the connoisseurs. obsessivewoman’s collection is mostly tagged cookbook and mystery; she hasn’t had as much time to get into the detailed tagging as I have.
RapLeaf are setting up a reputation management service for general commerce. I’ve syndicated their blog at rapleaf.
,
you can click it to find a web site’s neighbors in the physical world.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif){kind=small}
ljfoaf community for more details); I’ve also started meddling with XFN as well. These are both ways of describing relationships between people on the Net. The information in these protocols is pretty much the same as you’d get if you looked at my User Info page, but in a machine-readable format. This is all part of the Semantic Web project for encoding knowledge (rather than just data) into the Web.
For example, my XFN profile allows me to list weregamer as a friend, as a colleague, and as someone I’ve met in the flesh. An application following that link could conclude that I’m willing to vouch for weregamer being a real person.
Let me know if you don’t want it to be easy for machines to figure out that we’re friends; I can easily take you out of my FOAF-knows group on LJ. All this does is facilitate hyperlinking; any personal information exposed is up to what you put in your own profile.
