Books, libraries, and the web: disruption
Jon Udell's "The Disruptive Web", published in InfoWorld, is an intriguing description of what happened when creative minds sought to tie the AllConsuming project to libraries.
AllConsuming is a robot-driven weblog service which measures and displays the incidence of mentions of books on weblogs. It links to the weblog entries that mention the book as well as to the book's listing at Amazon for the convenience of those who want to buy the book. (A very imaginative way to generate revenue using the Amazon Partners program. If you want to reward creativity, use AllConsuming to buy your next book from Amazon.)
Udell had a further idea: incorporating links to libraries which have the books on hand, for those users who might want to borrow the book rather than buy it. His article describes the efforts that he pursued to incorporate the AllConsuming data with databases maintained by library services and covering over 900 libraries, using the all-important ISBN, and to coordinate the lookups with the user's zip code in order to prioritize the final output according to proximity to the user. The system was tied together using a scripting device called "bookmarklets".
What happened when he began to implement the idea? The answer reveals the source of the title of the article. The library service, rather than welcoming a new and innovative use of its online listings, pulled them from the Web!
Udell is somewhat vague about what happened next, other than mentioning the use of Google's cache of the listing page, and does not give any reason for the action taken by the library linking service. We can surmise that its normally quiet and low-bandwidth servers were overwhelmed by a sudden gush of enthusiastic script-empowered bloggers.
AllConsuming has its own weblog entry about the article and the project, including a link to Udell's Library Lookup page, which describes the project and which includes links to a number of articles and entries referencing it. For some reason, Udell does not provide the URL for the page in his article.
9:15:53 AM 
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