Here are a few things that has caught my eye recently:
iRemotePC — Feels a lot like LogMeIn and seems to work in a similar fashion. Install their client on a PC and now that PC can be securely accessed from anywhere with a java enabled browser. Remote Control, file sharing, etc.
There’s a free trial version that will work just fine for folks that just want to access a machine when they’re not near it.
Shelfari - Create a virtual bookshelf for your books. Basically, an interesting way to track your books and show them off to the world. Social bookshelf? Has the obligatory tagging features and groups and whatever else we expect when “social” is used.
I may have missed it, but I’m surprised not to see some sort of widgets available.
stikkit – I want to be cool and join the herd, but I don’t quite get it. It certainly seems nifty… but almost seems to revel in being extremely geeky. But heck, anything by a company named “values of n” is probably going to be interesting.
I just found this 43 Folders post about it. Perhaps I’ll read that 3 or 4 times and see if it sinks in.
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February 13th, 2007 
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Stikkit looks seriously cool. I love the screencast where there person sends the email and instructs Stikkit to tag and share the item in the message body.
Hi Peter! It is certainly intriguing, isn’t it?
You missed it. They have a rather attractive widget feature available.
You might also want to check out http://www.LibraryThing.com, an older, more popular and–in my biased opinion–rather better site.
Shelfari does have nice widgets though
The one *big HUGE* defect all the book catalog sites I’ve seen so far (including the two mentioned, LibraryThing and Shelfari) have is that it’s an absolute pain in the a$$ to get started. Adding 30 books in a sitting is a PITA…adding 3000+ that I have? No way, no how, it’s never gonna happen.
As an example, LibraryThing, you do a search for an author (John Ringo, in my test). I got 99 results back from Amazon….good. I select one to add…and it takes me out of the selection screen and to the “recently added” thing…and I have to do the search *again* to see the list.
Not happy with that, it splits the 99 results in several pages…so…once I added all the books in the first page, I had to hit NEXT in the search results *before* I could add any other books.
IMNSHO, that’s *bad* UI design. What would be the right way? You get the list of results, all of them together in a single page…with checkboxes next to each item…and an “Add to my library” button at the bottom. Simple, fast, easy…and I haven’t found *one single site* that does this.
All the sites seem to have been created with “I read a book this year” in mind, instead of “I read 8 books this week” or “I have a seriously sized library that I’d love to catalog”. Yes, I know people like me are rare…but…come on! It’s not rocket science!
So…I remain without catalog.
Oh, and 3000 books? It’s a lowball estimate of the number of paper books in my library…my ebooks library hit 25,000 (yes, twenty five thousand) books a few months ago…there’s no way in heaven or hell that I’d be able to add my paper library to one of these things, much less my electronic one, which is the one that’s still growing (I stopped buying paper books 3 or 4 years ago…I buy electronic now, exclusively).
Oh, I was gonna comment on Shelfari too, not only on LT.
And…as I started writing about how slow Shelfari was, I decided to check so I could time the thing in approximation…and it’s now working lightening fast. They still break the search results in multiple pages, which pisses me off (I have google configurated to give me 100 results per page…I still haven’t found if I can do that in Shelfari), but at least it’s AJAXy and you can just click a book to add it and then click the next one…*that* is how it should be done.
I still doubt I’ll ever add my 3000 books, or my 25000 ebooks…but…my major books and anything new I acquire? I believe I will. Well…I will, as soon as I find the “export list in a decent format” option…adding a bunch of books for the site to go under and me lose the info? no, thanks…I rather go the tellico way instead. (tellingo is a linux program for catalogs of anything you can think off…it’s well made, too, but it lacks the social component…and books *have* to be a social thing, even if you read them on your own…books are all about sharing, from the author to the readers, from the readers to the author and among the readers)
So…maybe, just maybe, Shelfari is the site I need to finally catalog all my books…or at least the ones I buy from now on…maybe.
Tim – I’m still missing it. I’m sure it’s just too obvious for my aging eyes.
Vox – Thanks! Great stuff to consider there, especially the thoughts around data entry and social.
The thing you are missing is a big button on the top right of your Shelf, it says “Add to Blog” or something like that…that’s where the widgets show up.
Unfortunately, for me it isn’t working…I have no clue if it’s ’cause I use linux or why, but I’m getting an error, both on my blog and on the preview on their site, so…I think I’m gonna end up deleting it from my sidebar soon.