Comments on: BookSpace

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 00:39:26 +0000

I’m messing around some with something similar. Right now all the reviews are audio but I’m hoping to have video and text submissions as well. It’s kind of amusing (although very small right now) and is based around one blog rather than a conglomeration.

http://byrdmiddle.org/books

By: Debzanne

Debzanne — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 07:55:27 +0000

This is less encompassing than what you’re talking about, but do you know about http://www.iblist.com? With an account, students can post their own reviews. I believe they’re only doing fiction right now, but the FAQ says (or said, when I read it in May) that they had plans to tackle non-fiction and other genres soon.

By: Ben

Ben — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 01:36:45 +0000

Funny you should mention creating a book review blog Todd. I’ve thought of the idea applied in two different ways this summer. Once while I was working at a small independent bookstore. The staff all writes up reviews on 3×5 cards and then tapes the reviews to the shelves by the books. Our customers always rave about it, and love that they get honest reviews from other average people, not from professionals that get paid to dissect books for a living. I thought it would be fantastic to do the same on the store website, but it has neither the technical ability, nor did I have the time to mention it to the owner. That and Barnes and Noble already has the whole user-review thing wrapped up.

The second thought was to do the book reviews in school in conjunction with the Media Specialist. She does a “battle of the books” with the kids at school and I thought it would help the teams out if they could blog about the books on their own spaces so that teams could be more productive. We’ll see if it comes to fruition, but honestly I’m not sure how I’m going to work it out yet as the battle is not mandatory and lots of kids won’t be participating. I’d still like to see what kids could do maintaining their own book blogs though. let us know if you get one going.

By: Ben Werdmuller

Ben Werdmuller — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 14:43:00 +0000

I’m not a lawyer, but DOPA should be circumvented: we’re just the infrastructure provider. The site is owned by the purchaser, and therefore they get to decide whether it’s commercial (and therefore covered) or not.

As for common readers, a simple example: you could create a keyword field called, say, “books read”. Let’s say I enter “Cat’s Eye”, which is one of my favourite novels; anyone can then click on Cat’s Eye and then get a list of everyone else who’s read it.

By: Todd

Todd — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 15:36:47 +0000

My problem with Elgg Spaces is the potential block because of DOPA or other fear mongering going on by the filter companies districts typically purchase plans from. I plan on giving it a shot, though and my email address should now be in your database for that.

Good to know that users can modify their own template. That means Elgg can easily take the place of Blogger in my classroom. Is there a way to automatically generate lists of “friends,” or what I might call common readers, based on certain fields of the profile? Is it convenient to make any of the connections drawn between users in Elgg visible in some kind of list? I’m sure it’s possible, but is that kind of ability already built into the system or would it take some doing to make it happen? Thanks for coming by, Ben. You’ve got a good thing happening over there.