The social side of reading

This weekend, I'll be eavesdropping on the biblioblog-types at the third Kidlitosphere conference. I'll be desperately trying to come up with some social aspect of reading that will intrigue my faculty committee and reinvigorate my stalled dissertation progress. That, and after reading these blogs for a bit, I am utterly taken with these women (because they are largely women) documenting their intellectual lives in these complex and interconnected ways, and if the NYT story yesterday about Nina Sankovitch was any indication, I'm not the only one interested. I'm thinking about data modeling (recommender systems?) for visualizing viral aspect of bookblogging, to lend some chops to the squishy-ness of the social web, but what I would really like to talk about are the strange external factors that govern the books we buy and read, like Janice Radway's A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire or Joan Shelley Rubin's The Making of Middlebrow Culture. I will keep you posted.