In the last few months, Web logging, or “blogging,” has become such a popular method of information sharing that even the reporters from the BBC blogged reports from Iraq during the war (www.bbc.co.uk/reporters). This book, written last year as blogging started to gain mainstream notice, provides an overview of the entire genre, from the ongoing arguments over the term “blog” and what defines one, to available software for setting up your own blog, to the politics of online identity and publicity.
The authors are closely affiliated with Blogger, one of the major blogging software and hosting services, and as such, the book often demonstrates their bias. Coverage of Blogger is somewhat more detailed and refined than coverage of other blogging software, particularly in the section on the history of blogging, and in the basic introduction on how to set up an account. Screenshots of Blogger are often used. Not until chapter 5, where you are shown a comparison between Blogger and three other major blogging software options (Radio UserLand, LiveJournal and Moveable Type), is the fact that the book isn’t just addressing blogging in the Blogger context really addressed.
Three sections make up the book, with a number of chapters in each. The second section, “Blog Elements,” is the most technical of the three. It provides a good explanation of the parts of a blog, how they are structured in both the back and front ends, and includes the chapter noted above that compares some of the most common blog software. This is supplemented in the appendices with some simple Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) instructions, links to other blog tools not previously covered in chapter 5, and a good glossary. Structured somewhat like a textbook, each chapter ends with a summary of the chapter’s content, and an exercise to perform as you go through and set up your first blog.
The other two sections, “What is a Blog” and “Advanced Blogging,” are more focused on the culture of blogging, helping the user to explore some of the more objective questions of online identity, feedback systems, and publicity. They also address the issues around using a collaborative blog in the workplace, as an intranet-based communications tool. This type of blog has the potential to become an increasingly popular and useful new knowledge management tool for some companies.
On the back cover of the book, the publisher has listed the reader level as “beginning to advanced,” which I feel is overly broad. While there is something in the book for bloggers and potential bloggers of all levels, more experienced users are likely to turn to the Web itself for more up-to-date technical explanations, and to start participating as a reader in the blogs of others. There is a companion weblog to the book (www.blogroots.com), where the authors post more current links and information. Readers can read three of the chapters (the most interesting three, in my opinion) here as well.
If you don’t know a thing about blogging, and want to jump on the bandwagon (or, maybe, blogwagon), this book is a very reasonable place to start. Those with more online publishing savvy, even as readers and not necessarily participants, would be better served checking out the book’s own weblog, and visiting the resources to which it links.
