ShelfReferential

We live in an age where the wiki concept has come to the fore, but in my opinion it has already proved its main shortcoming: nothing in a user-editable database is reliable. I think the Britannica versus Wikipedia debate has clearly shown this, though I know I am not in the majority among the digerati.

The goal of ShelfCentered is to become a source of clean, quality data, not another Gracenote database or Wikipedia. To that end, qualified experts will do things like combine “JK Rowling” and “J. K. Rowling”, fix misspellings, separate editions, etc. This is the only way to guarantee a high quality, reliable source of metadata for your items.

I guess when it comes to the wiki concept, I’m a snob. I don’t believe that a democratic process will converge to the truth. If we all voted on whether to spell “Have its cake and eat it, too” as “Have it’s cake and eat it, too”, are you willing to promise up front to live with the results? Or do you believe that there is a correct and an incorrect answer? Similarly, for things that are open to debate or very fuzzy, do you want a simple vote to resolve it, or would you prefer an expert to make the call?

This is how I feel today. Perhaps the wiki idea will grow on me.

Since the beta is open to the public, and yet the site is so incomplete still, I wanted to make some remarks about where it’s going, and what features you can expect to see.

1. You will of course be able to search your own shelves and public shelves; this is a big gap right now.
2. Similarly, I intend to support “smart shelves” analogous to iTunes’ smart playlists that are dynamic shelves based on a search criterion.
3. Searching the Library of Congress, other Amazon locales, IMDB, allmusic.com, and many other places to find rare items or items Amazon doesn’t sell — this is a high priority.
4. When searching multiple sources, there will be a cascade of precedence whenever sources contain the same fields. This will be transparent to the user, and may eventually be customizable like in Collectorz. This is tricky to get right, and may take some time to work out the conceptual kinks.
5. User editing of authors, titles, etc: This is a tricky issue, and is a distinguishing philosophy from LibraryThing. The short answer is there will be no user-editing. See the next post for more discussion.
6. Publishing your shelf (list or wishlist) as an RSS feed is another obvious feature I and others will want.
7. More information like editorial reviews, historical background, and any other data that can be pulled in will be added. The idea is to have a very rich source of information about all your items.
8. Tags. This is another interesting issue. The Web 2.0 fad is tag-crazy. I think we’ll stick with shelves for now and see what the compelling uses for tags turn out to be.
9. Recommendations. One of the big goals for ShelfCentered is to have a high-quality recommendation system. Finding similar shelves is a good start, so I’ll begin with a feature like that; it will only show you public or friendly shelves of course. A more sophisticated system that can also look into private shelves to recommend items will follow.
10. I may cap the number of items and offer a paid option to remove the cap. This is debatable, but for now my intention is for the site to be free with some reasonable cap for everyone.

I’m very excited to announce the imminent opening of ShelfCentered.com! In development for over a year, I think the site is finally taking enough shape that I want to release it to the public and see if anyone gives a darn!

The mission of ShelfCentered.com is to be the best site in the world for cataloging your stuff, finding recommendations, and sharing wishlists with friends and family. The inspiration came when my wife and I wanted to pack up our CDs and move them into storage, but wanted a catalog of what we were putting away. My wife is an archivist, and so it was obvious we needed a database. In the end, she created one from scratch, but along the way we discovered Delicious Monster, and Collectorz, which are wonderful programs that query multiple sources to help you quickly build a data-rich library of music, movies, books and games.

I thought these programs were great, but they had two big limitations. First, they aren’t free. Second, they’re not on the web! When I saw that Collectorz let you download reviews and commentary, I felt this was a killer app for the Data Age (not Information, mind you, just data). But it just screamed to be put online so that data could be updated and extended, to give the context of your stuff a future in cyberspace.

This blog will be our mouthpiece as we start to get the site going. As users start to sign up, I hope they will get interested in what’s going on and read the blog. We’ll see — here’s hoping!