There’s an interesting entry in John Battelle’s blog about adding a blogging mechanism that allows readers to optionally expose their reading habbits so that others can somewhat “read over their shoulder” (my own term for it). I’ve been interested in this for a while, mostly looking it from the knowledge management end. The closest that I’ve seen so far is the properly applied use of trackbacks. Trackback is a mechanism that allows blog A to send a message to blog B, with the message containing information for blog B about a referencing entry in blog A. The theory is that readers of blog B will then be able to read what others have posted on the topic. Trackbacks are far from universal however, and they only let one blog know about another, not about the general habbits of the readers at large. It would be nice to see a way for the mostly passive readers of blogs be able to participate in knowledge creation. I thought I remembered systems aimed at this type of thing, but a quick web search didn’t turn up anything along the lines of what I thought was out there. Maybe the projects were completely killed. Or maybe I’m just crazy. Either way, I think it would be worth experimenting with.