This book is a useful introduction to the world of blogging, and to the content management systems (CMS) that help users to create, manage, and publish blogs. The book is designed to help a novice or beginning blogger create his or her own blog. However, as someone who has been writing a blog for about six months (and who has had personal experience with several of the CMS systems profiled), I still learned some useful things from reading the book.

An interesting and influential group of authors has written the book, including Cory Doctorow, who runs the popular blog boingboing.net; J. Scott Johnson, who is a senior member of the Radio Userland blog CMS team; and Ben and Mena Trott, who wrote the widely-used Moveable Type CMS (which is actually the software I use to support my blog, www.spartacus.ws, in case you are curious).

An introduction to the world of blogging is included in the book, as well as an overview of the major desktop blogging clients, and chapters on the basic and advanced use of several major blogging CMS applications, including Blogger.com’s hosted CMS, Moveable Type’s server-based software, and Radio Userland’s desktop-based system, as well as the less widely known Blosxom server-side system. There is also an interesting chapter titled “Blogging Voices,” which has brief essays, written by several bloggers, sharing the authors’ experiences with the blogosphere.

Overall, I found this book to be clearly written, pitched at the appropriate level of detail, and attractively designed. In addition, I felt that it had the right number of screen shots and tables. My only criticism is that the authors didn’t include any mention of City Desk, which is a CMS used by several popular blogs, and that there was only a cursory discussion of Greymatter, which is another widely-used CMS. However, in a survey and introduction such as this, it is necessary to focus on a few major technologies rather than attempt to be fully comprehensive.