Let's talk about Ravelry, my new favorite website. The only thing I don't like about it is that nonmembers can't see much, so here's a link to some screenshots (scroll down a little).
Ravelry solves an actual problem for knitters: if you're working a pattern, and want to know how it turns out in real life, or what that tricky line in the pattern means, or what yarns work well with it, you're going to have a very hard time finding that information via Google. Since lots of knitting patterns have women's names, good luck finding the "Charlotte" you mean among all the other patterns with the same name or links to pictures of women named "Charlotte" wearing a sweater. Even if you've found the blog of a person who seems to be using your pattern, it's hard to find all the relevant entries. The results are so scattershot that you usually can't draw any conclusions about your question.
How did Ravelry solve this problem? With a solution that any librarian is sure to love: an authority file! They recruited volunteers to maintain a database of patterns so that every pattern has one (and only one) entry. Each Ravelry user attaches the record for her project to that record. Thus, when you look at the pattern, you can see a list of all the people who have done the project, with photos, sortable by lots of different criteria. There are similar authority files for designers, books, and yarn. (Projects are attached to patterns which are attached to books which are attached to designers--it's positively FRBResque!)