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!
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.
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?
But do you have the time to find all the news on every subject you're interested in? I know I don't (busy posting here!). For example, I'm interested in Google, but I don't have time to find all the news on Google (not Google News), so I visit the Google Weblog and find the news there. Same thing for PHP, I can visit php.com and zend.com but I don't really have time to visit all of the other sites, so I visit PHP Everywhere.
Could I find most of the news they do? Sure. Is the news all theirs? No, most of them are full of links to other news sources. But, since so they're interested in this news topc, over time, they can become "experts" on it themselves.
Oh wait... *doh*
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
"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.
I had the same question myself. But after searching a few blogs this morning, I realized that the bloggers are bonkers.
I mean, I came across some guy's site (I think his name was Rannie -- it was a Photography/Read the stories of my life Blog) -- and found him talking about "blogging meetings" and playing some sort of "survivor" blog game, and then bemoaning all the popular new Blogs these days because they're forgetting about the Blogger Old-Schoolers (and then he named a bunch of Bloggers who, I guess, are incredibly famous in the world of blogs.)
Anyway, I was surprised to stumble on an apparently thriving little (big?) sub-culture.
Me, I suspect the deal with Blogs is that when they're good -- they're really good -- but when they're bad, they're wretched exercises in navel-gazing narcissism. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, however.)
Yeah, "white hot" was a bit much, but I think Blogs still have their place. I think the Filter vs. "blog"/notebook style is important. I keep up with 6 or 7 filters, and only 1 or 2 notebooks.
Filters are great, they do the surfing for you, finding some diamonds in all that internet coal.
My site is mostly a filter, but with an emphasis on found quotes as well. I do it a little for the attention, but mostly as a record of my own life and findings.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
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"
Why would you care to talk with your friends? Because they might have insight or perspective that you find interesting. A weblog is nothing more (or less) than a way to express those same thoughts to many of your friends at once, without repeating yourself, and putting those thoughts where other people can also find them if they want to (or not, if they don't). Why do you have a problem with that?
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
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
* = Remarkeably, the ratio out male/female webloggers is completely out of sync with the ratio of men/women, where there are FAR more women weblogging then one would expect. Curious.
It's not that strange, given (grounded in reality) stereotypes about how women tend to gravitate towards technology's communication enabling sides.
I think all the anti-blog ranting here is really kind of funny. And by funny I mean stupid. Look, I'm as fond as a good goth/poetry teen angst blog as the next guy (which is to say not at all) but foaming at the mouth about 'em, or challenging the justification for the book's existence (look; she wanted to make a buck, there might be people into the subculture or needing a friendly introduction to make it worth their while) -- especially on a group-effort-blog like Slashdot-- is silly.
Some people write blogs to chronicle their own history for themselves, but make it public to either keep their writing level up, or because a small group of friends might be interested.
Like many other good things on the 'Net, the hype will (has, actually) die down, and Blobs will find their place as part of the landscape.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
YOU may not care about my blog...
But my friends and family all over the world DO. I used to send out mass emails to my whole address book. Blog allows me to have a bit richer content, add photos, whatever. The people that DO want to know what I'm up to like it. Thats all I really care about.
Here's the problem with personal blogging. Most of the people keeping "journal" style sites (referred to as "notebooks" above in the review) don't understand the difference between a well-written personal narrative and letting the world know that you went to the bathroom, just talked to Suzie, or stepped in dog crap. I agree that reading those kind of blogs are about as interesting as listening to a standard cell phone conversation. You don't learn anything.
But some of the personal narrative sites can be amusing, moving, and occasionally wise. I've really enjoyed reading this one and this one over the last year or two. You're missing out on some great writing, story telling, and even an odd discussion about the semantic web if you don't read them.
(And don't forget my own merely semi-pitiful narratives. I promise there is only one mention of attending to bodily functions on the whole site, and that's only in the context of a "wackiness ensues" story. I'd say that was a shameless plug, but I'm now somewhat ashamed. Ah, well.)
As for "link style" blogging -- I haven't figured out what makes the difference between the good and the bad. It's not necessarily focus -- Metafilter and even Slashdot are both all over the map. It's not even necessarily commentary... weak commentary or no commentary and a collection of links can still be interesting. Near as I can tell, it's interesting if the person/people collecting them have interesting trains of thought. Whatever that means.
Tweet, tweet.
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.
*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!
But I have to disagree with you that slashdot is a group-weblog. Slashdot is more like a new-commentary system
Well, that goes back to the distinction between "filter" blogs and "journal" blogs...I consider this and that that to be blogs as well, but more about links ala the filter type. Slashdot also is link centric...and given all the ranting and raving that takes place on the comments boards, it's even more journal-bloggy than the other sites, where commentary plays at best a secondary role.
I think there's a rather untapped potential for the blog format in the professional world. I think that kind of comments page, but where anyone can take the central soapbox, might be very useful in certain medium or large-size product teams.
I'm no big fan of the "this is where I went for lunch today" blog, but for better or worse, blog is a large-ish umbrella term, with some very promising parts.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
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?