The disruptive Web

I DID AN EXPERIMENT last week that nicely demonstrates the disruptive potential of Weblogs, Web services, and digital identity. My experiment began with two observations.

First, I noticed myself buying books from Amazon.com not on the basis of Amazon's recommendations but on the book-related blog postings gathered by a clever service called All Consuming ( www.allconsuming.net ). Like Blogdex ( http://blogdex.media.mit.edu ), Daypop ( www.daypop.com ), and Technorati ( www.technorati.com ), All Consuming measures the diffusion of links throughout a large network of blogs. But while the others measure the fluctuating interest in blogs themselves, All Consuming makes books the organizing principle.

All Consuming displays books mentioned on blogs in the last hour or week, summarizes and links to the citing blogs, and, using Amazon, Google, and other APIs, wraps book details, price comparison, and purchase apparatus around the discussion. Finally, it exports an RSS (Rich Site Summary) feed, an XML news-syndication format. As a subscriber to that feed, I'm reminded daily of the books being discussed on blogs. The reminders and the discussions they link to have raised my awareness of books and prompted me to buy them more often than usual.

The second observation followed directly: This was getting expensive. Could the local library help meet my surging demand for books? Its online catalog knew whether a book was locally available, but that information didn't appear in the right context. To switch from Amazon or All Consuming to the library's site for a requery doesn't take much effort. Once we establish a context, though, we are loath to abandon it. The question became how to avoid that context switch.

There was never any doubt that integration was possible. All these systems use ISBNs (International Standard Book Numbers) to identify books. When All Consuming scans blogs, it looks for ISBNs to find postings that mention books. All Consuming also uses ISBNs to create the SOAP calls that pull Amazon information into its Web pages and to form the URLs that send users to Amazon pages about those books.

Unlike Amazon, the library systems don't offer XML APIs. They appear to be merely form-driven Web sites. But hidden within those forms are the URLs that make every form-driven Web site a protoservice. And embedded within the search URL is the magic ISBN number.

I knew that manually copying the ISBN from one browser to another wouldn't satisfy most people. But I blogged that solution anyway because it was an interesting partial result that would provoke the blog hive mind to suggest how to take the next step. And it promptly did. Jenny Levine ( http://theshiftedlibrarian.com ) noted that my local library uses the same system as hers and that the system's vendor serves more than a thousand libraries. Another blogger, Scott Reynan, reminded me that bookmarklets, which are JavaScript snippets embedded in HTML links, can be installed in browsers' toolbars. A bookmarklet, when clicked, could inspect the current page's URL (say, at Amazon.com), capture the ISBN, form a library search URL incorporating the ISBN, and invoke that search in a new window.