Our server has been crashing lately--I apologize if you tried to come to the site before 3pm today and found that it wasn't here. I'm working actively on trying to find the cause of these crashes and find solutions. I think a move to a different server, one with mod_perl, may be in order.

I added a new section of the site today called the Metadata Scorecard. The idea came from Jon Udell: he wanted to see if we could encourage participation in metadata creation by giving it a score board. If people could easily see who was contributing the most, maybe people would spend a few minutes adding data so that they too might appear on the list. It's worth a try. I also took the chance to explain a bit more about the system for getting new types of metadata into the dropdown box--basically, any metadata label that appears in the database more than once will appear in the dropdown. This, I thought, would prevent it from filling with irrelevant labels, and also allow for the more popular ones to become normalized a bit. I didn't want to see everyone thinking of a different way to label a book's website, for instance. Anyway, it's still pretty simple, and could be easilty abused, but so far nobody has bothered.

I also completely re-wrote the way the hourly poll goes out and finds out which weblogs are talking about which books. Up until yesterday, the poll would run every hour, saving up links in a big hash-table and then at the very end save them all to the database. Occasionally the server would get slow and I'd have to kill polls in order to lessen the load... but it killed me because I'd lose all of the data that it had already collected during its run. Well, I won't go into the boring details, but now that's no longer a problem. And hopefully it won't hog as much memory as it did before either. That said, if you see anything strange happening, let me know.

Finally, some of you have opted to receive emails whenever one of your friends mentions a new book on their website. Those emails will now also include the excerpt from their weblog that mentions the book, if I can find one. There are still some glitches, so I apologize if you already received one and it looked really ugly. To sign up for these emails, create an account, add some friends, and sign up for the email in the Control Panel.

One last thing. I've been hearing reports that some of the titles for items on the site have been wrong. For example, while the cover image for "Linked: The New Science of Networks" was correct, it was displaying the title, "Personal
Responsibility Counselling and Therapy: An Integrative Approach". I tracked this down to a bug in Amazon's web services. They're aware of the problem and the fix should have been released. Now I just have to wait for my cached information to expire.

Okay, that's it for today. Oh yes--I also found a roommate for SXSW, and will be staying at the Hampton Inn. Thanks for the replies.

I'm going to be in Austin, Texas from March 7th-11th for SXSW, but can't afford to pay for the full cost of a hotel room. I'm staying in a double at the Hampton Inn, which is about 3 blocks from the convention center. If you're going to SXSW during this time and need a room, let me know.