If I haven't convinced you yet...

Okay, this is my last big plug for Shelfari.com.* If I actually had regular readers, perhaps I could charge them an advertising fee, but alas, I think my professor is the only one to ever give my ramblings the time of day! Nevertheless, the blog will go on (it has to, its required). There I go off on a tangent again - there's just something about Shelfari that inspires random exploration! If you are the type that is put off by chance encounters through site surfing, don't let it stop you from using Shelfari! You aren't obligated to follow link after link through endless pages of books and commentary, you know. You have every opportunity to use this PC Magazine Site of the Week... um, site... in a fully self-controlled manner, just as the many users of its Facebook application... might, er, well, probably don't do.

Anyhow, before I say anything else perhaps a bit too revealing about my relationship with books, let me tell you what other people are saying about Shelfari. The site made the Hindustan Times "Best and Worst of 2007" list, and in the good, happy way, not the embarrassing, think again way. True, it's only a short little blurb, but at least it made it on the map! Actually, Shelfari caught the attention of the Wall Street Journal Tech section as well, which quotes Josh Hug, who co-founded the site, as saying the number of users was "six digits." That was back in October of 2007. They could possibly have seven digits by now - especially since getting bought up by Amazon.com about a year ago (and then there's that Facebook app). Wow! That looks good!

Of course, there have been a couple of snafus along the path for this social networking site centered on books. Shelfari was accused of astroturfing (generating staged enthusiasm for itself) and a spam-like emailing application for inviting users' friends and acquaintances (every last one of them) to join the site. Shelfari claimed the first was an innocent mistake by a novice intern and the second - well, no word on that, as far as Wikipedia knows.

Overall, though, it is a useful site, as I have heartily declared before, and before that, too. Other than having been publically embarrassed, there are just a couple of significant downsides to Shelfari.com. The first is a problem common on social networking sites: sometimes users aren't all that enthused. Don't get me wrong, the Harry Potter pages have non-stop traffic; they seem to have their very own Shelfari Express to carry all known Potterphiles to the special wizarding realm on Shelfari. There were 287 groups found in a search for "Harry Potter," with membership ranging from one person to nearly a thousand. A search for Hogwarts in groups pulled up another 41 wizarding associated groups, including one with a membership of 1841 aspiring magical creatures, er, fans. Apparently I'm still a muggle - it wouldn't let me see the group content without joining. Sorry, but I'm just not that into you, Harry Potter!

Most of the groups I was actually interested in joining, though - Queer Theory (featuring a lovely picture of everyone's favorite gender philosopher, Judith Butler), Molecular Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, and Anthropology - the Peopling of the Earth, for example, have been about as active as a penguin in the Sahara (does nine or more months of inactivity qualify as officially dead?).

The second problem irritates me even more, perhaps because it should be entirely within the power (and intelligence) of Shelfari and Amazon to fix, like NOW. You can't properly search tags. You can tag any book with any tag you want, but the page of top 200 tags doesn't actually have any tags on it. And what if I wanted to search one that wasn't in the top 200? No option for that, not that I could find, anyhow, and believe me, I tried! Gender is one of my own personal favorite tags, and it was nowhere to be seen, despite my having used it. The one spot that does display some tags (which are clickable, thank goodness) is the "Most Popular" tab on the "Explore Books" page. There were only about 52 tags listed there, however, and the "more tags" link simply takes one to the useless top 200 tags page. Grrr! I want to have my gender and search it too, gosh darn it! This site would be much improved, and possibly more popular, were it to fix this glaring problem. Perhaps then more traffic would find my Gender and Anthropology groups, and we could have some actual conversations. After all, that is the point of Shelfari.com!


*To see a presentation I put together abut Shelfari, click here. Please excuse the lack of text - I use my visuals to complement my talk, not replace or distract from it.