Library thing is really cool

November 16, 2007 in Books, Censorship, Net Neutrality, Web 2.0, Wordpress

As noted earlier, Librarything is a handy place to post books and an example of new media working together with, rather than competing with, old media. Which is why I am rather frustrated that wordpress is doing some kind of censoring of Librarything widgets in the borders of blogs hosted on wordpress.com. Why do they do that?

Here’s a basic screen shot of the Librarything interface:

I could do a random cover group for my blog, which Library thing previews:

I could also do a random listing of my books, which would look like this:

 

Random books from my library

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson

Geography

Great Goya Etchings: The Proverbs, The Tauromaquia and The Bulls of Bordeaux (Dover Books on Fine Art) by Francisco Goya

Earth Abides by George R. Stewart

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

1984 (Signet Classics) by George Orwell Collapse (Penguin Press Science) by Jared Diamond

Kandinsky (Portfolio)

Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises by Architecture for Humanity

The Great Influenza: The story of the deadliest pandemic in history by John M. Barry

Dog Day by Alicia Gimenez-Bartlett

The White Plague by Frank Herbert

The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966 by Charles Bukowski

Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems, 1974-1977 by Charles Bukowski

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.

Franz Marc: The Retrospective

Mortal Engines by Stanislaw Lem

You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense by Charles Bukowski

Treehouses by Paula Henderson

powered by LibraryThing

But in reality I can do none of these things, because if I clip the text snippet into a widget, it gets deleted. Does wordpress have a policy against widgets that use java? Is this a security issue? Or is there another reason?