Sunday, May 4, 2008

Browse By Book Titles

You can now browse by book title on the sidebar.  For each book title, I created a post to index the collection of book nuggets for that book.  At some point, I may add lessons learned and book summaries / reviews for each book.  For now, it's a way for me to group nuggets together for a specific book. 

Test Drive It
Take the sidebar for a spin.  On the right-hand side you'll see Books (A-Z).  I recommend exploring these book nugget indexes:

For some books, I don't have a lot of nuggets yet.  For other books, I have quite a few.  I consider these living collections.  As I add nuggets from these books, I'll update these indexes.   Note that I haven't listed all the books yet.  I'm still catching up.

Index Posts Over Labels/Categories
I originally used labels, but that got out of control.  It wasn't very browsable and my category list got intimidating.  Now I have a list of books that I can slice and dice if I need to, as well as a simple list of key categories.  I think this gives me more flexibility for downstream improvements.

Sidebar of Books (A-Z) 
For now, I'll just flat list the books.  When the list gets too long, I'll potentially slice it by focus.  For example:

  • Body
  • Career/Workplace
  • Emotions
  • Financial
  • Mind
  • Personal Development

Then if one of my categories gets really large, such as Career/Workplace, then I might carve it up into more narrow focuses such as leadership, management, business ... etc.

Tests for Success
Ultimately, I measure The Book Share against the following:

  • Do you learn new skills that significantly improve the quality of your life?
  • Is The Book Share a searchable, browsable KB of useful, relevant book nuggets?
  • Is each post quickly scannable?
  • Are you able to implement each action nugget in a practical way?
  • Is each post standalone or reusable?
  • Can you find the nuggets you need by browsing by book or topic?
  • Can you find the nuggets you need by searching?

I'm still shaping what success for The Book Share is, but my guiding purpose is to turn the best insights from the best books into action for family, friends and beyond. 

What Would You Like To See
If you have ideas or suggestions, send my way.  I'm continuously acting on feedback, testing ideas, and running experiments to see how I can improve the usability of The Bookshare to transfer more knowledge, more effectively.

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