Books on Micro.blog by Manton Reece

Replied to Books on Micro.blog by Manton Reece (manton.org)

Today we’re introducing a search collection using emoji, starting with books. Just include the books emoji with your microblog text about a book you’re reading or related topic, and your post will automatically be collected on /discover/books.

@Manton has added an interesting new feature to micro.blog. He’s created a special book discovery page which users can use to see what others are reading or recommending.

Simply by including the books emoji 📚 in one’s post, the page will collect all those posts and display them at g/discover/books. In a sense, he’s using an emoji almost like a hashtag, though the mechanics of how things work are slightly different. I’m curious to see how it evolves.

Based on what I’m able to discern, I have the proud place of ownership for being the fourth book post to micro.blog with “The Library is finally unpacked” from several months ago. It isn’t a book recommendation, but it’ll give you and idea about what I think about books.

The sad part for me though is that he chose the books emoji 📚 . Why sad? Because for quite a while now I’ve been posting updates on my own site about what I read using various book-related emoji to indicate where I’m at with a book. I’ll use the bookmark emoji 🔖 to indicate things that I want to read. I use a green book emoji 📗 to indicate that I’ve started reading something, an open book emoji 📖 to indicate that I’m making progress, and a red book emoji 📕 to indicate that I’ve just finished or stopped reading a particular book. Most of my book status updates also have some notes or thoughts about what I’m reading as well as quotes, highlights, and other marginalia.

Since micro.blog’s discover page only uses one emoji, it’s missing out on all my past updates. For those who’d like to see them on my site, this link should have the entire archive. Not all of them are syndicated to Twitter, but this link will give folks an idea what these posts all look like there.

In a similar vein, I also often post what I’m reading online with glasses 👓 emoji. One of the things that’s always bothered me about Twitter was that people often share articles, but research has shown that very few actually bother to read them before sharing. (I’ve always gotten the impression that many don’t even bother to read the headlines.) Thus, following reading.am’s lead, I post everything I actually read online to my own website, but to indicate that it was read (from start to finish), I add the glasses emoji to the title. If I haven’t read it yet, it’s more likely hidden on my back end or, if it’s something I really want to advertise, promote, or highly expect I’ll come back to later, it will have a bookmark emoji 🔖.

I don’t publish all my reads publicly, a large number are published privately. You can find all of the public read posts here.

Lastly, for movies and television I’m watching, I include either TV emoji 📺 or film emoji 🎞️. I find that these emoji do really well for microblogging spaces which often have space restrictions.

Overall, I’ve quite enjoyed the evolution of micro.blog’s discovery features. While there are a few follow recommendations available, the service has a page with recent photos, so one can scan photos as a means of finding interesting people to follow on the service.

I can’t wait to see how the reading discovery page works out or what other new discovery tools Manton implements in the future. It’s nice to see a service that continues to evolve and change in reaction to its community.

Thanks Manton!