Before Christmas LibraryThing annouced a prize competition for uClassify integration, which I think was a brilliant idea. They wrote:

The Prize! So, LibraryThing calls on the book and library worlds to create something cool with uClassify by February 1, 2009 and post it here. The winner gets Toby Segaran’s Programming Collective Intelligence and a $100 gift certificate to Amazon or IndieBound.

Encouraged by this Kelly Vista entered the competition and submitted his contribution, a classifier that he describes in a comment on LibraryThing:

My goal was to create a classifier that would automatically “tag” any book description based on actual LibraryThing tags. For example, if you paste the book description for “Truman” into UClassify, it should return to you LibraryThing tags that suit the book. This is one step more general than one of your ideas (fiction vs. non-fiction).

The classifier has been published and can be tested here.

Where did the prize go?

I just received a comment from Kelly describing that apparently he was the only competition participant. Also Tim from LibraryThing acknowledged Kelly as the winner per e-mail. However Kevin never received the prestigious prize or even a follow up blog post. Kelly writes in the comment:

Unfortunately, the odd folks at LibraryThing decided to get all silent on me and I have not heard a peep from anyone since. In the meantime, they have found plenty of time to blog about other things. I spent 4-6 hours of my weekend time (which I could have spent with family) participating in the contest, assuming they were decent Internet citizens. And I won (as I mentioned, Tim e-mailed me so) — but then they never got back to me, not after repeated pings, and as a result, I was never awarded the prize they promised.

Tim, what happened here?

On LibraryThing you can add your own books to a personal library. By doing this you start to get recommendations from either other users who has read the same book or automatically by the system. There are also several forums where users can discuss books - just like a really really big book club. At the time I signed up there were over 34 million books added. I added a couple of books I have recently read and to my surprise all of them already existed in the system, even the Swedish ones. After adding them I was immediately getting lots of recommendations, such as “The Satanic Verses” and “Robot : mere machine to transcendent mind”. Really cool!

Now with all these books some kind of categorization could help.

Competition

LibraryThing are encouraging their users to create something cool with uClassify. The prize is $100 Amazon gift certificate and Toby Segaran’s “Programming Collective Intelligence”. LibraryThing also presents a couple of cool ideas which you can use such as fictional vs non-fiction. The competition ends on February 1 2009 so what are you waiting for?