What I wish allconsuming.net did

Allconsuming is a website and web service that shows what books bloggers are reading, based on blog aggregator pings and Amazon links.
Unfortunately, Allconsuming has a “hot-or-not” model that concentrates on the books that people are reading now — in the last hour, day, week, month.
This form doesn’t take full advantage of the “long tail”. The zeitgeist check is of some interest. At any given time, the “hit book” of the moment will be at the top of the list.
But over time, there’s a large distribution of books read. I’d love to see the reviews of people who’ve read Interface over the last year, with the current election in mind.
But you can’t even reconstruct the history from the AllConsuming api. GetWeblogMentionsForBook can also take an argument in the form of “days_back” but the number of days back that you get data for can’t be greater than 60.” (It does looks like it’s possible to crawl the archive, here: http://allconsuming.net/at-this-time.cgi)
Also, when you browse Allconsuming.net, you can’t tell the difference between a book mentioned in a “currently reading” sidebar, and a book review. The useful view would omit entries that are less than 10 words (say), and would print 50 word excerpts, so you could tell which entries were reviews or essays actually discussing the book.
These hacks would make it easier to expose book-related conversation, and to take advantage of “the long tail” — with 4 million bloggers, a few people have probably written about the book you’re currently reading.

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