Slashdot Mirror
The Weblog Handbook
Blood begins the book in the obvious place, with a discussion of the history of the weblog format, and a functional definition of what a weblog is (and isn't). One issue with the word "weblog" as it is currently used is that it means little more than "website with time-stamped entries arranged in reverse chronological order". Blood attempts to expand on that definition by pointing out that the other thing weblogs have in common, in addition to chronological formatting convention, is "the primacy of the link":
"It is the link that gives weblogs their credibility by creating a transparency that is impossible in any other medium. It is the link that creates the community in which weblogs exist. It is the link the distinguishes the weblog -- or any other piece of online writing -- from old-media writing that has merely been transplanted to the Web."
One of my primary objections to this section of the book was the contradiction between the above position and Blood's inclusion, earlier in the same chapter, of "blog"- and "notebook"-style sites under the weblogs banner. "Blog"-style sites, in the book's taxonomy, are the nano-journals that showed up in the wake of easy-to-use tools like Pitas and Blogger. These web-based weblogging applications made it easy to let the world know when you were getting up from your desk to go pee -- and thousands of people jumped at the chance to do just that. "Notebook"-style web sites, on the other hand, are characterized by longer chunks of content; they tend to resemble essay collections more than anything else. Both types of sites are markedly different in content and authorial intent from the traditional "filter" style weblogs -- collections of links, annotated with short (or sometimes not so short) descriptions, reviews, or reactions.
Indeed, the former two styles of sites seem to be to be fundamentally different than the latter style, primarily in the extent to which they're inwardly versus externally focused. "Filter" weblogs link almost exclusively to other sites, and they link heavily -- usually averaging at least one link per entry, if not more. "Blogs" and "notebooks", on the other hand, have a much lower frequency of external linking, and are much more self-referential and insular than "filter" style sites. The three sorts of sites share similar formats and are produced with similar tools, but I would argue that referring to all of them as "weblogs" makes the word so generic as to render it useless as a description.
My quibbles over these taxonomic issues aside, The Weblog Handbook's introduction and definition of the "blog", "notebook", and "filter" terms to refer to the various sorts of sites that are collectively known as "weblogs" is a valuable contribution. Hopefully these words will be adopted by other writers in subsequent discussions of weblog history and form.
Blood moves on from the initial historical overview to a discussion of why someone would want to take the time and make the effort to start and maintain a weblog. She covers all the main bases: improving writing skills, improving thinking skills, and networking for personal or business reasons. This chapter might help you think of some new way to leverage your weblog to your advantage, but otherwise it struck me as somewhat redundant -- presumably, if you're interested enough to undertake reading a 200 page book about weblogs, you're interested enough to try running one for a week or a month and see what benefits you get from the exercise.
The next pair of chapters cover setting up a weblog. The target here is the new blogger, and depending on your level of technical sophistication, you might find the coverage a bit simplistic. Nevertheless, these chapters contain sound advice about choosing tools, about some of the conventions of the weblog community (permalinks, archives, sidebars), and about the all-important step of choosing a name for your weblog. After covering set-up, Blood dives into the business of actual creation: how to start writing weblog entries, and how to get better at it over time.
Blood also covers strategies for attracting and retaining readers, tempering those tips with the sage advice that webloggers that are constantly striving to get more readers will never be happy with the reader population that they currently have. This is one of the more critical points that the book has to make, in my opinion, and Blood does a good job of driving home the notion that there are better (and easier) ways of becoming famous than starting a weblog.
The sixth chapter, covering weblog community, ethics, and etiquette, is one of the book's most important. New bloggers that read this section will learn how to avoid offending established webloggers while they are starting out in the community. Bloggers that heed Blood's rules for ethical weblogging may even avoid getting sued for libel. Additionally, Blood deserves further kudos for making this section of the book freely available on her website.
Blood rounds out the book with some miscellaneous advice about maintaining a regular update schedule for your weblog, the wisdom of keeping some modicum of privacy for your off-line life, and the issues over making an email address publicly available -- opening yourself up not only to contact with your readers, but also with every spammer in the universe. None of the material in this chapter will be novel for the experienced web surfer, but Blood's thoughtful treatment is a good introduction for the neophytes that are still out there.
The book finishes up with a trio of appendices. The first covers an actual session with a particular weblog application; the second contains some practical Elements of Style-style advice on creating "linktext" -- the actual words inside a hypertext anchor; and the third offers information on the mechanics of running a weblog -- selecting a web hosting provider, buying a domain, analyzing log files, and so on.
The Weblog Handbook is a well-written, well-rounded, thoughtful introduction to the art and practice of maintaining a weblog. The author, Rebecca Blood, has taken her years of experience gained maintaining her own weblog, boiled it down into concise nuggets of information and advice, and then presented it with a vigor and enthusiasm which clearly reflects her love for the weblog form. Recommended for novice and old-school webloggers alike.
You can purchase The Weblog Handbook from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Someone should really clean that up.
Behold the superior reviewing technique on display in the Pigdog Journal review!
Seriously. 99% of the blogs out there are ridiculous ego trips.
Why would I care to read your stupid rantings? Why would I care to get my daily news from someone with as much authority on the 'news' as myself? Are we so in need of entertainment that our ravenous hunger for material has necessitated the development of individual publishing?
Don't get me wrong, that individual publishing exist is a beautiful, beautiful thing. However, the blog phenomenon is about as interesting as reading other peoples checkbooks.
that I ever learned, I learned at Movable Type's website. They've got a great customizable sytem, and EASY install setup. (I've got my non-techie teacher pers to set it up.) And it is easy to use with all sorts of options... ;-)
If Timothy can advertise books on the front page, I can advertise a blog in the posts.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
It is exactly this kind of overanalyzing that is making the web suck.
Oh wait... *doh*
Um, I was under the impression that "blogs" (what a stupid name that is) were trendy and cool four years ago, but are just derivative sources of meaningless drivel these days.
Do people actually still read and write these things?
Hey everybody - I'm working on a new book. It's called "The Slashdot Handbook: Practical Advice on posting comments and submitting stories to Slashdot". Please buy it.
Thank you.
5 GET Webspace
10 PRINT Opinion
20 IF OPINION = NotHorriblyCrappy THEN GOTO 10
30 END
Blogs have to be one of the most natural uses of the web for not-too-techie folk. Easy-to-use tools to get your opinion out to the world pretty close to real-time. But you read a book to figure out how or why to do it?
"Blood covers all the bases..."
That was a disturbing image.
You seem to have no problem reading Slashdot -- the mecca of "Stupid Rantings" (though I haven't seen Katz in a while).
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Blogging is the digital diarrhea of the internet. From those annoying idiots who update other idiots on their daily activities to those anti-social rejects who sit home and type out crap thinking someone will read all that shit.
NEWSFLASH: Nobody cares, you FuQn moron!$@
Great! Now there is a book on blogging. So grandma can unload her rusty memories from 1940's onto the internet, clogging the perfectly fine storage space on google.com CEASE AND DECIST GRANDMA! Unless its going to bring something new to the humanity, you're better off doing something productive until the grim reaper comes to take you away into the land of extreme blog hatred.
Oh, lets not forget those 14y/o angsty teens who listen to Linkin Park and Avril Lavigne. If these are the people who will be the next wave on the internet, then I'm switching to analog computing and will chew off my CAT5 cables just to liberate myself from the trainwreck of the civilization that is the World Wide Wreck.
Did you know Hitler used to Blog? Yep. It's called Mein Kampf. Scary stuff folks.
So next time you see a blogger, kindly break his/her fingers so they can become an end-user (Read Only), and not a pseudo-webmasters/mistresses spelling out the end of the civilization as we know it.
BLOGGING IS WRONG. AND YOU KNOW IT.
This rant was brought to you by Committee on Coffee Deficiency.
If so, I may have to buy it so I can be down with the kids on the street. Yo.
Ade_
/
Big Bubbles (no troubles) - what sucks, who sucks and you suck
Sometimes I walk into ReadMeDoc.Com and ask - did a tree really have to die for that subject? Not to disparage the writer, but I have to categorize this one under the "DUH" section along with "MacIntosh for Dummies."
Blogging can be learned two ways. Visiting blogs. Its easy, there are tech blogs, there are pundit blogs, there are blogs for dogs and blogs4God. There are even nichy topical blogs, such as how to fix your church's web page.
Then there are a variety of free or next-to-nothing tools to get the job done. For the absolute newbie, there is Blogger.com. Once you've figured it out a bit, you can graduate to MovableType. And if you're really afraid of HTML, you can spend $49 and do it brain dead with Radio Userland. There are also a gazillion of choices inbetween.
The point is, blogging is simple. Its not more difficult than back in 1995 when we all posted our first kitty-kat pictures using notepad or VI. Writing good content for blogs is the hard part.
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
Brainy Blog: That's obvious, Papa Blog. If you blog the blog equations, you'll blog to the obvious blogclusion that --
Blogette: Lookout! It's Blogamel! With his evil Blog!
All the Blogs: Oh no! Blog for your lives! We're blogged! Blog me! Run for the blog! Save the blogs!(etc)
I'm blogging for the cure. Are you?
Carousel is a lie!
Some people say that weblogs are wonderful things as they give everyone a voice - well, everyone on the internet, that is, but the kind of people who say this don't believe people not on the internet count.
The simple truth of the matter is that 99.999% of these people have nothing of any interest or value to say.
Or look at it like this.
Once upon a time, people had diaries. Books of blank paper in which they would scribble down their tepid thoughts, worthless deeds, bad goth poetry (is there any other kind?) and stories about their cats. Then at the end of the day they'd close up the diary and shove it under the mattress, as it was all secret and they didn't want anyone to read it.
But now we have blogging and livejournals, and rather than writing all this stuff in a book and hiding it under the mattress, they publish this on the internet for all to see.
How many terabytes of diskspace is taken up with bad goth poetry? How many servers does it take to hold everyone's wibblings about their bloody cats?
How many gigawatts of electricity has to be generated to power the servers and the routers and all the infrastructure needed for these things to work?
They're all just a terrible waste of resources!
Remember this. Weblogs pollute the planet, physically and psychically. Just Say No!
"Information wants to be paid"
The idea of a "filter" blog is to point to interesting content, right? So someone takes time to "find interesting content" and point to it. I would rather that person spent his or her time CREATING interesting content.
As it is, we already have plenty of sites that point to other cool sites. (memepool, etc.) I think it is wrong to encourage people to create more - the truly motivated already are doing so. We need to teach people how to find something that is NOT already covered a hundred times (Why isn't there a page that tells us what charles nelson riley is doing right now?) and to make an interesting page that people will actually want to point TO.
Live journals are a cut above that, because at least they aren't just pointing to other people's works. But, again, you don't need a book telling you how to make a live journal - go to one of the live journal sites and start. The people who would possibly have an interesting live journal are already doing it.
I guess what I'm saying is that anyone who would buy this book is probably not someone who will be adding any interesting content to the web.
God is real unless declared integer
I just want to say how much I hate the word "blog." What's wrong with "weblog?"
- Have a picture
Captain's Weblog, Stardate 3.141592654.
Mood: pissy
Well, Spock and Bones are at it again. I don't even know what the argument is about this time. Geez, can't they just follow the Prime Directive for once? Every time this happens I just want to curl up into a little ball and hide in my quarters. I hate conflict.
Music: Torn, Natalie Imbruglia.
Carousel is a lie!
As I arrived to work, I cruised on by ./
and low and behold, there was a report of a new book on how to Make My Own Weblog.
Much to my suprise, I had been going about it all wrong. you see, I am apparently
supposed to copy and paste my writings into the text upload field as opposed
to cutting and pasting. You can just imagine the virtual egg on my face. My
whole Blog World was turned upside down.
Next they are going to say something crazy like I should submit my site to search engines to increase traffic to my rantings.
I find that the book could be a very difficult read for some and I have decided to create a Blog Book Discussion Blog to account for what looks to be a tumutuous journey through this wonderful guide. I also have plans to create m own new guide, The Blog Book Discussion Blog for Dummies, to be available in time for the holidays. Please visit my Blog Book Discussion Blog and buy my The Blog Book Discussion Blog for Dummies.
Peace, until next time...
I think blogs are like karaoke. Nobody wants to watch a bunch of drunken people singing, but it is very fun to sing. Same way, almost all blogs are useless crap, but they are fun for the one who writes.
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
Your correct that writing content is the entire point of a weblog, which is why creating one should be as simple as possible. Someone interested in writing -- not computing -- should have a tool that is as simple as possible. Something that lets good writers with something to say get on the web without jumping a computer skills barrier.
/. readers, for whom learning is often more important than doing but /. readers don't represent mainstream computer users.
Slashdotters often make the mistake of assuming more knowledge and experience on the part of mainstream computer users than is probably justified.(Hence, the frequent arrogant insults about "lusers".) Blogger requires you to understand that you must find space on a server to host your files. That requires you to understand the notion of clients and servers. MoveableType requires an awareness of what "code" is and an ability to successfully install and edit code. Radio comes close to being simple and intuitive, but drags you into the weeds as soon as you want to tweak it. ("What's XML?")
Blogging is simple from the perspective of
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I'm in a class where the teacher is making us post blogs. Not for personal hopes and bitching, but for thoughts on class, questions, and biweekly assignments or mini-reports if you will. Using the nifty free (beer?) movable type software, other classmates and the prof. can leave comments. We've had one assignment and so far, so good.
Look here if curious.
when Push Comes to Shove
Hallelujah!
I have yet to see a blog that offers a few security features I'd like to see:
1. A blog that has a challenge/response login page. This would be a blog that for my family that I would post updates and pictures of my kids. I don't want the whole world reading about my kids. The pages would be secured by a set of challenge/responses that I could enter such as: "My mom's maiden name", "My Dad's middle name". My immediate and extended family can answer those questions and get in without the need to remember any kind of userid/password.
2. Blog pages that I can create limited-access URLs to. For example, let's say I have a blog I use to keep design ideas. Only I have access to it. But I create a couple entries that I'd like to share with a couple friends for feedback. I'd like to be able to create a URL with some kind of key that I can email them. They can click on the URL and get to that page and no other. Then they can submit feedback.
Is this available?
-tim
A few blogs try to go the informative rant. My blog tries that and stays the course on one, and only one topic.
I take other blogs with a grain of salt. Some I read for other professional/user perspective (such as Doc Searls or the venerable Dan Gillmor. I enjoy the casual thoughts from Meg, a cofounder of the Blogger blogsite, and, just for kicks and grins, read sites with attitude like Up Yours, which chronicles the happiness of a lovely mom in a twisted little world.
The real problem with blogs isn't blogs itself. That's like blaming the gun for the shooting of a person. The problem is that most people can't string a simple sentence together, which makes reading some sites a pain.
On the up side, people who can't write may find blogging to be theraputic--if they can stand the mail flames.
I personally like how I plug my own blog with my sig, like so:
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
...by some of these posts. I just recently set up my own web log, and am not posting the link for a reason. I did it for me. I love to write in my free time. It is an easy, convenient way for me to express what I'm feeling at any given point in the day. Being a junior in college with an IT profession, what better way for me to maintain what I deem as a healthy hobby? No, I don't go around reading other people's "blogs" and losing myself in someone else's life (or what they protray of it). I write for everyone and no one. I could give two shits if anyone ever stumbles across my little site. It is simply my online "journal", and I see nothing wrong with that.
to find out if your blog is hot or not. Let public opinion decide for you =]
What?
*sniff* this is just so beautiful..*sniff* I never knew there such as place as this wonderful place called /. *sniff* All my life I have looked for a place where I could feel at home. I feel so normal here at /. *sniff, snort* I hate blogs, you see. I hate blogs, style, senior citizen car drivers, writers, fashion designers, male dancers, and Poodles. God, I hate poodles. But not as much as I hate blogs. Only writers do blogs. I suspect all writers, fashion designers, and male dancers either have or plan to have stylish Poodles. God, I hate poodles. and blogs. Thank you, very much!
I don't post for the masses or rant about world issues. Everybody knows that opinions on the internet are like assholes. Everybody's got them, and most of them stink.
Who I do post for are my friends and relatives, who, if they wanted to, could check up on my life, see my work sched (I work shift), read a bit of my relational life and all the little stuff you don't want to repeat to every single friend, again and again. It's my bulletin board, and it's all mine. If you know me, check it out. If you don't, I don't have anything interesting to say to you, except for some pictures of my hot friends.
That said, here are a few more "yahoo" like resources you can use to navigate your way around the "blogosphere:"
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
Ok, I don't know much about blogging, but I maintain two wiki sites - one at work and one for personal use. Both work very well, wiki is amazingly flexible and useful.
As far as I understand, my personal wiki site is similar to those "notepad"-style blogs... Something like a collection of essays, thoughts, reviews, some quotes stolen from diferent places, etc. The wiki gives an advantage, though - if I wish, I can easily structure the content of wiki by multiple criteria. The blog organization seems to be mostly chronology-oriented (is it correct?)
Anyway, does anyone have experience in both blogging and wikiing (ha! invented a word!)? What are their pro/contra for personal-notebook usage?
I had to stop reading as soon as I came to the word "bloggeratti."
As a long-time webblogger myself, I'd have to say that most of these weblogging books are total bullshit. There should be only one of these books.. 'Weblogging for Dummies' and that's it.
They're mostly dull simplistic guides to posting your thoughts and feelings on the Web. Big deal. They're as useful as the classics, 'How to write a diary' or 'How to read a book'.
The only book worth its salt, IMHO, is We:Blog, since it covers the commercial and emerging angle of weblogs in being used with commercial situations. But books for personal bloggers? A waste of time. Really.
mogorific carpentry experiments
That's what you get for naming yourself after your husband.
Where are the mod points when you need them... +1 funny.