As a chronic organizer of all things digital I have been intrigued with “microformats”. In a conversation with my youngest son—he was curious about applying star ratings to book reviews. It turns out that his teachers are using “wikispaces” to aid in the teaching process (way to go teachers!) and they want to be able to apply a star based rating system to their book reviews.
In my quest to answer his question I did run across some good resources:
hreview creator—this tool creates hreview code for you. The site provides a form to input the appropriate values and provides the code for copying and pasting into your web page.
Wetpaint and Socialtext are also good tools for creating “wikis” (alternative options for wikispaces).
Amazon now offers a media library where users can add books (and other media types) to their account. The student would be able to apply a star rating, add comments and “tags”. The beauty of this service is that a student can very easily search and order new books—when the book is ordered, it automatically pops up in the media library (it isn’t automatically shared with the outside world though unless a setting is changed to allow for that to happen).
Google books has also has a tool called “my library” that allows a user/student to keep a list of books. As with the Amazon tool you can add a review, rating and tags to each entry. The service from Google Books has an RSS feed feature—Amazon might, but I didn’t see it. The RSS feature could allow the teacher to subscribe to each students book list via an RSS news reader like Google Reader. This would allow the teacher to see new and changed entries in a particular students book list (very cool).
Interestingly enough, a website called “LibraryThing” beat both Amazon and Google to the punch with their service. My favorite item about this site—you can use a cue cat scanner to improve the book input process. A Max OSX based application called “Bookpedia” is also cue cat scanner friendly (I’m a registered user of this one).
