"...Until recently, this hasn't been the case. If you wanted to find out what a large group of people were doing, you would have to find a proxy to that information, some general indicator of what the group was doing via book sales or Nielsen ratings or random polls. With a lot of the things happening on the Web, though, this is changing. Enormous amounts of information are being placed online, universally accessible and machine-readable ... the data is interesting: it gives us a glimpse of the patterns and trends that emerge out of the collective activity of the entire group, bypassing the traditional necessity of trusting a few voices to represent the many. It is truly a model for distributed idea generation and interpretation which is only beginning to be tapped. All Consuming is a tiny filter on top of this vast collection of group activity, aimed solely at finding connections between weblogs and books, but I look forward to the day when hundreds of other views of the data are available to consume and build upon." [Erik Benson, at xml.com]

1:26:38 PM