Just found a great site called Allconsuming – they provide a way to find books based on recommendations from other blogs. The really nice thing about the site is that you can sign up and create a list of books you are reading and then post those automatically to your site. I am doing this now – the listing to the right used to be a hand coded HTML listing – now I just add books to Allconsuming and they appear over there. The really cool thing about AllConsuming is that it just uses a bunch of web services in the background, from many different sites. I do kinda wonder about how reliable the service will be because it has so many dependencies, but what the heck, it is free.

Here is a further description of AllConsuming from their website:

All Consuming is a website that visits recently updated weblogs every hour, checking them for links to books on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Book Sense, and other book sites. Every book on this site has a list of all the weblogs that have mentioned it, and every weblog that has mentioned books in the past also has a page here listing which books it has mentioned. If you have a weblog, search for it here to see if we’ve picked anything up from it yet.

This site was inspired by Book Watch, and uses web services from Weblogs.com, Amazon.com, Technorati.com, and Alexa.com. A web service is basically a system that lets websites talk to each other, sharing information between each other without the intervention of pesky humans. All Consuming also has a web service, available in SOAP and REST flavors.

Sign up to create a list of books you’re currently reading, have read, or plan to read. You can also make a list of your favorite books. You can also display this list on your own site by including a small snippet of javascript on your site (and you don’t need to know any HTML).

XML? RSS? We cache most of our content in xml and rss, so have a look through this directory for a list of available feeds. Archived feeds are kept here. As I continue to work on this site, one thing I’d like to do is make the xml a little more presentable… but most people that know what to do with xml probably won’t care too much about the presentation. So there you go. Do something interesting.