Insert Witty Journal Title Here

So.. I think this is a new thing on LibraryThing. I just saw it today and started playing, and I'm already pretty high up in the rankings. So either I'm awesome, or I don't have a lot of competition yet. Well, okay, I am awesome, but some of that latter too, I think.

Basically what it is is LibraryThing shows you a cover, and you have to tag it based on what you see in the cover. Maybe it's 'blue', and has 'mountains', and a 'river', and a 'man' with a 'sword' on a 'horse'. So you'd type in 'blue, mountains, river, man, sword, horse' and whatever else you can think of. You might also say 'blue mountains, man on a horse'. You get a point for everything you say that matches what somebody else said about the cover. So it's a neat little game to play.

Of course the point of the whole thing is to gather tags like this, so that when people wander into a library and say 'I really loved that book with the red knife on the cover. I wish I knew what it was!', the librarian can head over to LibraryThing and find all the covers with red knives on them. Et voila, book found!

But I think the data could also be used to find what details of covers sell well. Which are common. Which are uncommon. And probably a bunch of other uses I haven't thought of, but other smart people will.

So that's all cool and stuff. But the main point of me posting this on Livejournal is to rally people to join into this game/data-inputting mission with an extra thought in your mind while you're doing it. If it's a white woman on the cover, make sure one of your tags is 'white woman', or 'Caucasian woman' if you'd prefer. Or both. If it's a white man, put white man. If it's a disembodied hand that's white, put 'white hand' or 'creepy white hand'!

Not only will you individually be adding this extra data point, but when other people see that you put 'white woman', they'll think twice the next time they see a white woman on a different cover and put 'white woman' as one of their tags, to try to get more points.

And since it is early days, it should have a snowballing effect.

Not only will there be that extra data in LibraryThing's cover database, but maybe it will get some people out of the mindset of "white is default, so it needn't be stated, nor even noticed". And they'll start noticing it when they weren't noticing it before.

Any flaws in my plan?

Oh, hey, you probably want a link, huh?

http://www.librarything.com/coverguess