Shelfari.com, in their own words, is a social media site focused on books. It is an online community of readers who come together to share their passion for books. To that goal, they give you various tools with which to share your love of books such as ratings, reviews, tags, friends, groups, suggestions, etc.

Shelfari was launched in 2006 by Taste Makers Inc. In 2007, Amazon.com reportedly invested $1 million in it which explains the heavy Amazon influence on the site.

This is all good and all, but I’ve tried participating in the community and making friends - by first approaching people who had similar reading interests. This seems like a no brainer, but nobody seems to want to be my friend. Perhaps I need a new profile pic? I don’t really participate in groups and other social features so most of the “social media” stuff is lost on me. What I do use Shelfari for is their visual bookshelf. When you add books to your collection, they are added to your virtual bookshelf which looks quite wonderful.

The whole site is very interactive and visually pleasing. The bookshelf visualization apes a piece of Mac software called Delicious Library which lets you catalog your books, dvds, and cds. The interface of the website is very AJAXy. For example, when you add a book, you are presented with a drop down that lets you easily add the book to your wishlist, your reading list, or your collection, all in one click. They also have a widget that lets you put your Shelfari books in your blog. Here’s what that looks like:

If you do any reading and want to share your collection and reading habits online, you should check this out.

It’s that time of the month that I report on the progress of this blog. This month, I didn’t have nearly as many posts. This was due to 2 reasons. I was on vacation for a week, and things have been very busy in my life that I haven’t had nearly as much time to blog as I wanted.

Let’s analyze the numbers. I had an almost 7 fold increase in traffic. This was due to several reasons: traffic from my existing content, and the social bookmarking site stumbleupon. I bookmark my pages on stumbleupon and try to tag them with as many meaningful tags relevant to the page as much as possible. I definitely recommend stumbleupon as a traffic generation tool. A little bit of traffic even came from my wushu youtube videos which I linked back to my site.

This month I had 14 posts, about 1 post every 2 days. Not bad considering the week off and the very busy schedule. The number of comments was quite disappointing considering the traffic. It’s probably safe to assume that the stumbleupon crowd aren’t big commenters.

I won’t be discussing ad revenue anymore. However it’s safe to say it’s negligible until traffic drastically increases. I will say that I’ve experienced over a 10 fold increase in Amazon affiliate sales due to the traffic. This was a pleasant surprise. I had experimented writing recommendation blog posts in which I recommend products and provide links to Amazon products that I review and recommend. Seems to be working. I even recommend it in a blog post here.

It’s pretty exciting to see the increase in traffic. How many of those people will come back to read my other posts remains to be seen. I did get a comment from a reader telling me to stick to new technology posts and not regurgitating information. I’ll try to make it a good mix between posts that tend to attract traffic, latest tech news in RIAs, and my personal life.

I checked out PicLens a while back when the tool first came out. They’ve added a whole bunch of new features so it seems like a good time to revisit them. PicLens by Cooliris is a plugin that integrates with your web browser to display you the photos (or whatever media) on whatever website you’re on in glorious fullscreen 3D.

Screenshot of PicLens on my Flickr Page

Basically the way PicLens works is when you are on a page with images, you mouse over an image and you’ll see a PicLens icon. When you click on the icon, PicLens takes over and you switch you a fullscreen view of the images in 3D. PicLens takes advantage of 3D hardware acceleration to provide a really smooth browsing experience even if you are flipping through 1000s of photos.

Screenshot of PicLens on my Flickr Page

What’s cool about PicLens since I’ve last saw them is that they’ve added support for so many more things. You can view images from Flickr, PhotoBucket, Facebook, MySpace. On top of that, you can also browse Youtube, MSNBC, ESPN and movie trailers. PicLens has definitely come a long way. PicLens is definitely worth checking out especially if you like browsing in totally cool immersive experiences.

This week will be a mixed bag of links from every and any subject matter. It’s whatever I thought was funny or cool or just wanted to share with my readers.

• Type in your name and find out your Ikea name and furniture. Hours of entertainment.
• I performed some more motion capture for the upcoming Midway game: Mortal Kombat vs DC this week. Check out my Flickr photos.
• An internal memo written in 2003 by Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft, chewing out his people over his horrendous experience with XP and the Microsoft website. The guy knew what he was talking about. Maybe it was a combination of bureaucracy and incompetency that mired the XP experience.
• A marine blogger gives his 2 cents on the high tech always connected soldier and the effect on the modern battle field.

I want to finish off with this really cool video of Carnegie Melon’s slithering robot that swims in the water.

Yelp.com, for those of you not in the know, was started by 2 former PayPal employees. It’s a website that features reviews of local businesses submitted by users of the website. Yelp has some great social networking features as well as a reputation system that encourages users to stick to the site and submit more and more reviews. It’s actually quite neat.

Let me preface this with the fact that I started out loving Yelp. I came to rely on it for every restaurant I wanted to try out. I even introduced my wife to it who then proceeded to go on a Yelp rampage. Within a period of a month she had written about 60 reviews and proceeded to become a Yelp Elite member - a status bestowed on users who are both prolific and write good quality content.

My love affair with Yelp started to turn sour when I used it not from the point of view of a review consumer, but as a business owner. I teach Chinese martial arts (aka wushu) at one of the most reputable schools in Chicago. Working in technology, I realize the importance of having an Internet presence that extends beyond just having a static website. In order to build a good online reputation for the school, I asked all my students to write their review of the school on Yelp. Most of the students aren’t so Internet savvy and hadn’t even heard of Yelp. I was basically recommending Yelp to this group of people.

I got a total of 28 students to review the school. Everybody wrote their honest impression of the school. I didn’t force or coach anyone to write what they didn’t want to write. I just told them to get on the site and review us. My thought was that if you were looking for a wushu school in Chicago on Yelp, you’ll gravitate to the one with the most reviews provided that the reviews were meaningful.

This is when the problem began. After a few days, the reviews started disappearing one by one on the Yelp site until I went from 28 reviews to 18 reviews. I was pissed. I know you can flag reviews, and I suspected that maybe a competing business who’s reviews weren’t so glowing was flagging my students’ reviews. I emailed Yelp, and they didn’t tell me anything useful. Their response was a cookie cutter legalese mumbo jumbo saying that their only concern was the quality of the site and that they had final say of what when on the site. Since my wife was an Elite member, I thought maybe she would have more pull. Again she was given the exact same cookie cutter response. I wasn’t ready to give up on Yelp just yet and found out a friend of mine in Palo Alto knew a Yelp employee. I contacted that Yelp employee and ran into the same brick wall. At that point I just threw up my hands and said screw it.

Nowadays I never go back to Yelp for any reviews. They’ve totally lost me as a visitor. I just can’t help but wonder what other perfectly good businesses reviewed on there have totally been shafted. When you have a lot of reviews, losing a couple here and there is not a big deal. But if you had a small business and all you had were 4 glowing reviews and 2 of them got deleted, that could make the difference between the visitor going to you or to the next guy with 2 equally good reviews.

Social review sites are popping up all over the net. All the major players like Google, MSN, Yahoo, and AOL have them. We’ve reached the point where users no longer trust in traditional marketing and advertising. Proclaiming you’ve got the best tacos is town is not enough. People want to read what other people have to say about your tacos. In the future, as people get more and more net savvy, the differentiating factor of these review sites is whether the user can trust these reviews or not. As for Yelp, they’ve totally lost my trust and until they make it right I’m going to keep telling people not to go there.