While poking around this evening (read: early morning) trying to find even more interesting blog resources, I finally stumbled upon something truly great: Erik Benson’s blogisphere reading tracker, All Consuming.
So what’s it do, you ask? A number of things, which I will try to explain in non-technical terms because I’ve been told I’m confusing people a lot these days.
First off, All Consuming scours the weblog directories (such as weblogs.com or blo.gs) and picks up any comments made about books on nearly any blog out there. Thus, off-handed comments I made about Nick Tosches in an entry at the beginning of the month are included on the appropriate page. That’s EXTREMELY cool, since it allows for multiple opinions to be seamlessly added to a central repository of book information.
Second, if you create an account, you can add books to your reading list, which through some careful data manipulation, can appear on your own personal blog. Thus, the new “Currently Reading” portion of the sidebar. That’s entirely XML driven.
Finally, as a nice community driven feature, you can mark other bloggers as “friends” and thus get recommendations based on what those people read.
Very cool stuff, and a great practical example of what the whirlwind of technology I learned about in 502 last Spring could lend itself to.
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