thanks to the always enjoyable Library Stories blog from Adri Edwards-Johnson, I learned about this amazing experiment in social software, relying on blogs, amazon.com, and SHEER GENIUS:

http://www.allconsuming.net/

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.

You can see books most mentioned in the Last Hour, Today, Yesterday, A Week Ago, A Month Ago, A Year Ago, Most Mentioned Books in 2003 and Most Mentioned Books in 2002.

this is what computers are GOOD at (crawling around the web counting things): and we get to enjoy the results. totally absolutely cool.