b.cognosco

One particular thought is about Amazon, whose real value has been in their prowess with complex e-commerce systems, marketing, and connecting customers. Amazon's profitability as a retail sales company remains suspect, even after years of effort and hundreds of millions in expense. Now accessible web services like AllConsuming and booktalk could prove to be enormously disruptive to Amazon -- by developing a robust, non-commercial, community-based network around books -- that supplants the company's own customer community.

Which is more valuable -- tracking and managing data about books you have, want or love; or OneClick™ shopping? Developments like booktalk can potentially democratize one of the few remaining differentiators among major book retailers, putting even more pressure on already thin margins.

booktalk
[...] A fine web resource not only for humans, but as a software service too. In constructing allconsuming.net, Erik has deliberately left software hooks and information bait dangling from the site, ready for us to connect and consume. Moreover, he encourages us to do so, telling us to "Use [his] XML" and try out his SOAP interface.

So I did.

While allconsuming.net can send you book reading recommendations (by email) based on what your friends are reading and commenting about, I thought it might be useful to be able to read any comments that were made on books that you had in your collection. "I've got book X. Let me know when someone says something about book X".

So I whipped up a little script, booktalk, which indeed uses allconsuming.net's hooks to build a new service. What booktalk does, crontabbed on an hourly basis, is to grab a user's currently reading and favourite books lists and then look at the hourly list of latest books mentioned. Any intersections are pushed onto the top of a list of items in an RSS file, which represents a sort of 'commentary alert' feed for that user and his books. [...] [DJ's Weblog]