Found AllConsuming.net through a referral to my blog earlier today, triggered because I'd mentioned Bill Sammon's new book, MISUNDERESTIMATED: The President Battles Terrorism, John Kerry and the Bush Haters on Tuesday.

AllConsuming.net "is a website that watches weblogs for books that they're talking about, and displays the most popular ones on an hourly basis." In addition, you can pop a title into AllConsuming.net and find the blogs that have referenced it. That bit of code is pretty interesting. Enter /pride and prejudice/ and the site hares off to see what titles match /pride and prejudice/ at Amazon. Taking those titles, AllConsuming checks the blogs it covers for references.

Amazon came up with ten references, including Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, The Annotated Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, David M. Shapard, Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife: Pride and Prejudice Continues by Linda Berdoll, &c. The plain Jane Pride and Prejudice has forty-four Weblog mentions.

Click on the title and AllConsuming returns publishing information, Amazon sales rank, Amazon average rating (4.56 stars), &c. plus snippets from the blogs that mentioned the book, listed in reverse calendar order (newest first).

"I'm reading this book."
said george on April 27, 2004.

"Delectable!"
said thatgirl on April 1, 2004.

"One of my favourite books of all time. The wit, gentility, finely drawn characters, and the change which the protagonists undergo makes this book a thoroughly enjoyable read."
said civility on March 29, 2004.

If you decide you want to read more about what a given poster thinks of the book, click on the poster's name and AllConsuming sends back a synopsis of the site, books mentioned on the site and more information.

Hm. http://allconsuming.net/weblog.cgi?url=http://www.towse.com/blogger/blog.htm

My Google Friends section lists three sites whose owners I know and four sites that I have no idea why they're listed as Google Friends.

The allConsuming folks describe how they come up with the information: "This is a weblog detail page. It has information gleaned from Alexa.com, Google.com, and Amazon.com. Combining all of this information together, I can display a screenshot of the weblog, related sites according to Google, and products that have appeared on this website in the past."

The automagician needs some work.

FWIW, the current hourly update reads, "Although we found 814 books last hour, none of them were mentioned on that particular weblog for the first time."

For today, the top five mentioned titles are

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (17 mentions)
A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L'Engle (13 mentions)
Angels & Demons by Dan Brown (10 mentions)
Plan of Attack by Bob Woodward (15 mentions)
My Life by Bill Clinton (6 mentions)

Good to see L'Engle is beating out the newbies with her oldbie book. Turns out it's because there was a Wrinkle in Time movie on TV, which triggered people to read the book.

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   posted by Sal Towse at  12:50 PM|| |