Mathemagenic

I believe that the best thing that could happen to a book is to be read, so my books always travel across homes of my friends (and sometimes forget to come back :).

So, in case you haven't come across it yet, let me introduce BookCrossing. The idea is simple:

The '3 Rs' of BookCrossing...

1. Read a good book (you already know how to do that)
2. Register it here (along with your journal comments), get a unique BCID (BookCrossing ID number), and label the book
3. Release it for someone else to read (give it to a friend, leave it on a park bench, donate it to charity, "forget" it in a coffee shop, etc.), and get notified by email each time someone comes here and records journal entries for that book. And if you make Release Notes on the book, others can Go Hunting for it and try to find it!

Next to releasing books once in a while, one can also start a BookCrossing Zone somewhere in a place with regular releases of books. When reading about it I've got an idea - why BookCrossing Zone should be located in a place, why not mobile?

So, what do you think about Mobile BookCrossing Zone? Something like:

• there is an event with many like-minded people coming together - for example a conference
• you ask them to bring books they would like to share with others
• you provide labels to mark books, a place to release them and a sign that explains rules of the game
• see what happens

Wondering if something like that would work... May be we should try at next BlogWalk :)

Richard MacManus on changes in Bloglines subsriptions in 3 months:

Remember my post 3 months ago that analysed Bloglines subscriber stats? Well I thought I'd review the numbers. You can blame Seb Paquet for this ;-) Why? Because he's just posted something on his weblog for the first time in over 3 months, which got me thinking about how his time away from blogging affected his stats. It turns out his Bloglines subscriber numbers have increased by 25% over the last 3 months, despite him not posting a single new entry! A similar story for Mark Pilgrim, who has all but turned his back on blogging - yet his stats are up 31%.

My subscriptions are 15% higher (compare with Richard's own 78% growth and check absolute numbers as well)... Read the rest for more statistics and discussion...

My two cents:

1. As I wrote before, I'm a bit scared about my own high numbers. Mainly because I can't return the favour (with my 200+ subscribtions I'm on the edge of what I can handle), so it makes me feel blogging more like broadcasting than a conversation, which I want it to be.

2. I keep wondering how many "dead" subscriptions are there? In a world of news aggregators Bloglines is similar to Blogger in the world of blogging - free, easy to try introduction platform that many play with and then decide that it's not for them or move somewhere else. So I wonder how many abandoned Bloglines subscriptions are there...

Btw, if you are not reading Richard's blog you should give it a try (only be prepared for long, well-researched and well-crafted posts :)