Metaplanar Babel

I think I’ve finally managed to find a media collection application. It’s a little web app called Listal that’s currently in an open Beta phase. Like so many other social tagging collectives, Listal allows users to compile lists of DVDs, books, music, and computer games that they own or wish they owned. Each item links to a summary, pertinant stats, and links to other people who have included that item in their list. Unlike another app I looked into, Listal also allows sorting, custom lists, and some other neat little features that I haven’t run into yet.

Because it’s still in beta, obviously there are some quirks left to iron out, but thus far, I’ve been pretty impressed. The only thing I can really complain about at this point is the fact that sorting and display settings aren’t saved anywhere and default to a list of items, sorted by date entered, which isn’t very useful to me. This has been mentioned on the forum once already, and I added my voice to it as well, so we’ll see if anything gets changed in the future.

Anyway, one of the neat features that I really like is the “frequency cloud” of directors and actors that is available on the DVD Home page. I really can’t tell you why Keanu Reeves tops our actor list, but .. there you go, an interesting tidbit about our movie collection. Another neat thing is the ability to display your collection with emphasis on the DVD cover image (kind of reminds me of the output from Delicious Monster, which Brendan had suggested before). Also, supposedly there are some bookmarklets out there that take advantage of some Amazon API functionality to easily add items, but I haven’t been able to find them yet. A couple of bookmarklets are available that you can use, while browsing Amazon, to take advantage of Amazon’s search capabilities.

I’ve only been signed up for a day, but this is the slickest social media collection management application (oi what a mouthful) that I’ve seen thus far (I have to rule out delicious monster only because I don’t have a Mac, and I couldn’t find anywhere that it would run on anything but). The interface is clean, relatively intuitive, and pleasing to look at. The navigation generally makes sense, and adding items is pretty easy, even if you have a large-ish collection. I haven’t played much with the rating or tagging stuff yet, but both ideas seem to have potential. Creating custom lists is really simple as well, and you can easily add descriptions for each item within the list as well as specify the ordering (I think). There aren’t currently any hooks to display data in another site (like a blog), but there are rss feeds available, so I think it shouldn’t be too hard to work something up. My only regret currently is that I didn’t find it sooner - Listal’s been up since August 29!

Take a look at my collection if you like, and let me know if you start one of your own!