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Who Let the Blogs Out?: A Hyperconnected Peek at the World of Weblogs
Blogs--or weblogs--are a huge phenomenon on the internet. From ultra-personal diary entries to specialized information on a wide variety of subjects (teen ranting to presidential campaigns), blogs are the new way to create a virtual community that can effect real-world change. It's not hard to set up a blog, but it can be difficult adjusting to life in the "Blogosphere."
One of the first blogging experts, who helped found the weblog community Xanga, Biz Stone will help
--learn the origins of blogging
--discover why blogging is so popular
--explore the ettiquette of the blogosphere
--bring traffic to a blog
--make money by blogging
--use a blog to become influential in any industry
--maintain a blog and keep it fresh
With internet heavies like AOL, Microsoft, and Google already providing weblog software, blogging is moving out of indie geek culture and into the mainstream. Who Let the Blogs Out? is a next generation blogging book for anyone who wants to get started or anyone who wants to keep their blog blooming.
One of the first blogging experts, who helped found the weblog community Xanga, Biz Stone will help
--learn the origins of blogging
--discover why blogging is so popular
--explore the ettiquette of the blogosphere
--bring traffic to a blog
--make money by blogging
--use a blog to become influential in any industry
--maintain a blog and keep it fresh
With internet heavies like AOL, Microsoft, and Google already providing weblog software, blogging is moving out of indie geek culture and into the mainstream. Who Let the Blogs Out? is a next generation blogging book for anyone who wants to get started or anyone who wants to keep their blog blooming.
256 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2004
3 people are currently reading
71 people want to read
About the author
Biz Stone
11 books37 followersChristopher Isaac "Biz" Stone (born March 10, 1974) is a co-inventor and co-founder of Twitter, Inc and also helped to create and launch Xanga, Blogger, Odeo, The Obvious Corporation and Medium. In 2012, Stone co-founded a start-up called Jelly Industries where he serves as CEO. The release of the Jelly app, a Q&A platform that relies on images, was officially announced in January 2014.
Stone graduated from Wellesley High School in Wellesley, Massachusetts. He attended, but did not graduate from, both Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts.
Aside from Twitter, Stone is an angel investor and advisor in the startup community having backed companies in a diversity of industries such as Square, Nest Labs, Beyond Meat, Medium and GoodFit. Stone is a board director at Beyond Meat, Medium, GoodFit and his newest startup, Jelly Industries.
Stone made his directorial debut working alongside Ron Howard and Canon USA to direct a short film as a part of Project Imaginat10n. Stone described the opportunity as a chance to scratch a long-time creative itch. Stone is also Executive Producer on WIRED, a dramatic series set in the 70s about the birth of computer industry.
Stone has published two books about blogging, Blogging Genius: Strategies for Instant Web Content (New Riders, 2002) and Who Let The Blogs Out (St Martins, 2004). In addition to his long running personal blog, Stone has published an op-ed piece in The Atlantic. In June 2012, Hachette's Grand Central Publishing and executive editor Ben Greenberg announced that Stone was writing a book called Things A Little Bird Told Me, which was published in April 2014.
Stone is a vegan, which he became after visiting Farm Sanctuary, and is involved in causes including animal welfare, environmentalism, poverty, health, and education. Stone is an active advisor and contributor to Donors Choose, a nonprofit helping classrooms in need.
Stone lives in Marin County, California with his wife Livia and his son Jacob. He and his wife founded and operate the Biz and Livia Stone Foundation, which supports education and conservation in California.
Stone graduated from Wellesley High School in Wellesley, Massachusetts. He attended, but did not graduate from, both Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts.
Aside from Twitter, Stone is an angel investor and advisor in the startup community having backed companies in a diversity of industries such as Square, Nest Labs, Beyond Meat, Medium and GoodFit. Stone is a board director at Beyond Meat, Medium, GoodFit and his newest startup, Jelly Industries.
Stone made his directorial debut working alongside Ron Howard and Canon USA to direct a short film as a part of Project Imaginat10n. Stone described the opportunity as a chance to scratch a long-time creative itch. Stone is also Executive Producer on WIRED, a dramatic series set in the 70s about the birth of computer industry.
Stone has published two books about blogging, Blogging Genius: Strategies for Instant Web Content (New Riders, 2002) and Who Let The Blogs Out (St Martins, 2004). In addition to his long running personal blog, Stone has published an op-ed piece in The Atlantic. In June 2012, Hachette's Grand Central Publishing and executive editor Ben Greenberg announced that Stone was writing a book called Things A Little Bird Told Me, which was published in April 2014.
Stone is a vegan, which he became after visiting Farm Sanctuary, and is involved in causes including animal welfare, environmentalism, poverty, health, and education. Stone is an active advisor and contributor to Donors Choose, a nonprofit helping classrooms in need.
Stone lives in Marin County, California with his wife Livia and his son Jacob. He and his wife founded and operate the Biz and Livia Stone Foundation, which supports education and conservation in California.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
January 19, 2011
Disclaimer: the notes you're about to read were extracted from this book and I do not intend to take personal credit for any of them.
• Blogger is a server-based system, which means users do not need to install anything on their own machines. Ease of use and a strong, early-to-market brand made blogger ground zero for blogging revolution.
• In the last five years, blogging has emerged as an important form of democratic self expression and continues to grow in significance as the web mature and expands from computers into wireless devices and beyond.
• In 1999 Blogging really happened. A bunch of easy blogging tools were released on the web, including Pyra labs’ Blogger and Userland’s Manila.
• Today there are millions of blogs on every possible topic published by journalists, politicians, proffesors, teenagers, parents, fat people, skinny people, homeless people, dead people when someone transcribes a diary, celebrities, fools, geniuses and probably some guy dressed up like a Sultan in his onion head hat.
• We all wear masks and a blog can hide, show or exaggerate who a person really is. It’s not a matter of creating a persona versus telling the truth about oneself, because the truth is in the posts.
• Good telling of human stories is the best way to keep the internet and the World Wide Web from becoming a waste vastland. With enough perseverance and personality you could create a seminal site.
• ¿Do you think weblogs will replace mainstream media?
Probably not. I think You could aggregate weblog content to produce a decentralized version of a newspaper…I think that the relationship between weblogs and mainstream media is probably more symbiotic than competitive.
¿Will the blog bubble burst?
Sure. But it’ll be like most internet bubbles: the real bubble is in attention. Napster got a lot of attention a couple years ago. That bubble has “burst”, but there’s actually more filetrading going on now than there was then.
• Blogs have reacted to the needs of the world and have grown in a pattern similar to that of the web itself. At first a playground for geeks, later more popular with the appearance of web-based tools, an industry following when millions of people began flocking to the new medium.
• Kimmy Ho Interview:
¿Why do you blog?
I blog to share events with my friends, to store links and information for future reference, document certain events, but mostly just for fun.
• Steve Jenson Interview:
Good Bloggers tend to write to an ethereal “audience” whether or not it exists. Their post make sense without having you to read the entire blog. We’ve helped created a whole generation of archivists and cataloguers who are perfecting the art of writing a review.
¿How is blogging changing the web? ¿Society?
Something I really appreciate about blogging is how it has focused the web away from being a billboard for crappy products and instead has turned it into a canvas for a group mural. Some pieces are very practical and some very abstract.
• Social networking sites are fun, and there are lots of people who do find love, friends and jobs by participating in them. Still something seems to be missing. Once you’ve persuaded all your friends to join and you have a virtual network numbering in the hundreds of thousands ¿What are you supposed to get out of it? ¿What if you already have enough friends and a job?
• Comments
Take it outside: Don’t get into nasty argument on your blog. That’s like inviting people over to dinner and yelling at your spouse in front of them. The proper way to deal with a corrupt comment is to delete it and its place put “Comment removed: off topic. Or something equally antiseptic. If you must get into a fight, take it outside – do it over E-mail.
It’s your house: It’s your blog; you own it and you are in charge of the content. Remember your blog is a web proxy for you; if there is a comment in your page that you feel uncomfortable publishing under your name you should go ahead and remove it.
• You should know how to behave when it comes to leaving comments yourself. Sometimes we forget. Be civil, make the point you want to make, but remember you are in someone’s else’s house. If you want people to respect your point of view, be thoughtful and proofread your comment.
• Once you sign up and publish your first post, you have become part of a new media frontier. Your voice has been added to the character of the blogosphere. For a unexplored territory, it’s pretty forgiving and you’re allowed to make mistakes – just avoid making enemies. Blogging is a cathartic Exercise, a business-related enterprise, a group endeavour or a one person web newspaper…If a blog is the online version of you, then the blogosphere is the online version of our world, our home. As Olympia Dukakis remind us “Don’t shit where you eat”.
• It really doesn’t matter if our blog is focused in a hobby, your work, politics or just what you do during the course of the day Blogging is information sharing and the more you research an share, the more you gain expertise in your area of interest, even if that area is only “things that interest me”…Bogging is a everyday practice of searching, thinking and writing. There are many benefits to this exercise.
• The future of peer to peer file sharing is not music or movies –it’s information. Getting web enabled cell phones into developing nations and showing people how to use them as a broadcasting tool could be transformative. The self organizing power of a hyperconected population it’s frightening to regimes that are used to the illusions they have control over the information that citizens receive.
• HTML, is one of the more frustrating things about blogging when you first get started. Bloging is no longer just for geeks, but no matter how WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) your blogging software is , there will always be a little bit of HTML that you’ll want to do.
• The artifacts you include in your sidebar, the font you pick for your posts and the descriptions you write in your blogs settings are all extensions of your virtual self. People read and publish blogs because they recognize that there is a way to put themselves into this virtual world and interact within it. With every new sign-up to Blogger our word gets a little smaller and the web gets more character.
• Blogging beats traditional content management systems because blogs are thousands upons thousands of dollar cheaper that any other way to disseminate information and they are easy.
• It’s fairly obvious that blogging works best for everyone, including students, when there are topics to write about that capture the imagination and spark a passion.
• Blogs are digital entities springled throughout the vastness of cyberspace, yet they created their own connectedness. The blogosphere is the networks of blogs that lives within the world wide web –a web within the web–but it’s more than document and hyperlinks. Behind it are many individuals who combine to form an aggregated entity with its own force; it is a new media ecosystem with a complex social culture based on knowledge, entertainment, and the sharing of ideas.
• Like an ant colony, the blogosphere is a world of individuals, each doing its own thing. The pattern that emerges from this chaos is nothing short of fascinating.
• Blogging kickstarted a revolution in hyperconnectivity and communication via the web – it was the spark of life that internet was missing…From the Blogosphere a new plane of existence has arisen –like a good version of the matrix –where we are all enhanced by unlimited access to knowledge and experience and had the ability to add our own.
• Blog: Noun: A personal website that provides updated headlines and news articles of other sites that are of interest to the user, also may include journal entries, commentaries and recommendations compiled by the user; also written Weblog, Web log Verb., To compose and publish a blog entry
• Link Whore: A blogger who will compromise every possible principle he or she once had in order to get more bloggers to link to him/her. Also: link slut.
- Biz Stone -
• Blogger is a server-based system, which means users do not need to install anything on their own machines. Ease of use and a strong, early-to-market brand made blogger ground zero for blogging revolution.
• In the last five years, blogging has emerged as an important form of democratic self expression and continues to grow in significance as the web mature and expands from computers into wireless devices and beyond.
• In 1999 Blogging really happened. A bunch of easy blogging tools were released on the web, including Pyra labs’ Blogger and Userland’s Manila.
• Today there are millions of blogs on every possible topic published by journalists, politicians, proffesors, teenagers, parents, fat people, skinny people, homeless people, dead people when someone transcribes a diary, celebrities, fools, geniuses and probably some guy dressed up like a Sultan in his onion head hat.
• We all wear masks and a blog can hide, show or exaggerate who a person really is. It’s not a matter of creating a persona versus telling the truth about oneself, because the truth is in the posts.
• Good telling of human stories is the best way to keep the internet and the World Wide Web from becoming a waste vastland. With enough perseverance and personality you could create a seminal site.
• ¿Do you think weblogs will replace mainstream media?
Probably not. I think You could aggregate weblog content to produce a decentralized version of a newspaper…I think that the relationship between weblogs and mainstream media is probably more symbiotic than competitive.
¿Will the blog bubble burst?
Sure. But it’ll be like most internet bubbles: the real bubble is in attention. Napster got a lot of attention a couple years ago. That bubble has “burst”, but there’s actually more filetrading going on now than there was then.
• Blogs have reacted to the needs of the world and have grown in a pattern similar to that of the web itself. At first a playground for geeks, later more popular with the appearance of web-based tools, an industry following when millions of people began flocking to the new medium.
• Kimmy Ho Interview:
¿Why do you blog?
I blog to share events with my friends, to store links and information for future reference, document certain events, but mostly just for fun.
• Steve Jenson Interview:
Good Bloggers tend to write to an ethereal “audience” whether or not it exists. Their post make sense without having you to read the entire blog. We’ve helped created a whole generation of archivists and cataloguers who are perfecting the art of writing a review.
¿How is blogging changing the web? ¿Society?
Something I really appreciate about blogging is how it has focused the web away from being a billboard for crappy products and instead has turned it into a canvas for a group mural. Some pieces are very practical and some very abstract.
• Social networking sites are fun, and there are lots of people who do find love, friends and jobs by participating in them. Still something seems to be missing. Once you’ve persuaded all your friends to join and you have a virtual network numbering in the hundreds of thousands ¿What are you supposed to get out of it? ¿What if you already have enough friends and a job?
• Comments
Take it outside: Don’t get into nasty argument on your blog. That’s like inviting people over to dinner and yelling at your spouse in front of them. The proper way to deal with a corrupt comment is to delete it and its place put “Comment removed: off topic. Or something equally antiseptic. If you must get into a fight, take it outside – do it over E-mail.
It’s your house: It’s your blog; you own it and you are in charge of the content. Remember your blog is a web proxy for you; if there is a comment in your page that you feel uncomfortable publishing under your name you should go ahead and remove it.
• You should know how to behave when it comes to leaving comments yourself. Sometimes we forget. Be civil, make the point you want to make, but remember you are in someone’s else’s house. If you want people to respect your point of view, be thoughtful and proofread your comment.
• Once you sign up and publish your first post, you have become part of a new media frontier. Your voice has been added to the character of the blogosphere. For a unexplored territory, it’s pretty forgiving and you’re allowed to make mistakes – just avoid making enemies. Blogging is a cathartic Exercise, a business-related enterprise, a group endeavour or a one person web newspaper…If a blog is the online version of you, then the blogosphere is the online version of our world, our home. As Olympia Dukakis remind us “Don’t shit where you eat”.
• It really doesn’t matter if our blog is focused in a hobby, your work, politics or just what you do during the course of the day Blogging is information sharing and the more you research an share, the more you gain expertise in your area of interest, even if that area is only “things that interest me”…Bogging is a everyday practice of searching, thinking and writing. There are many benefits to this exercise.
• The future of peer to peer file sharing is not music or movies –it’s information. Getting web enabled cell phones into developing nations and showing people how to use them as a broadcasting tool could be transformative. The self organizing power of a hyperconected population it’s frightening to regimes that are used to the illusions they have control over the information that citizens receive.
• HTML, is one of the more frustrating things about blogging when you first get started. Bloging is no longer just for geeks, but no matter how WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) your blogging software is , there will always be a little bit of HTML that you’ll want to do.
• The artifacts you include in your sidebar, the font you pick for your posts and the descriptions you write in your blogs settings are all extensions of your virtual self. People read and publish blogs because they recognize that there is a way to put themselves into this virtual world and interact within it. With every new sign-up to Blogger our word gets a little smaller and the web gets more character.
• Blogging beats traditional content management systems because blogs are thousands upons thousands of dollar cheaper that any other way to disseminate information and they are easy.
• It’s fairly obvious that blogging works best for everyone, including students, when there are topics to write about that capture the imagination and spark a passion.
• Blogs are digital entities springled throughout the vastness of cyberspace, yet they created their own connectedness. The blogosphere is the networks of blogs that lives within the world wide web –a web within the web–but it’s more than document and hyperlinks. Behind it are many individuals who combine to form an aggregated entity with its own force; it is a new media ecosystem with a complex social culture based on knowledge, entertainment, and the sharing of ideas.
• Like an ant colony, the blogosphere is a world of individuals, each doing its own thing. The pattern that emerges from this chaos is nothing short of fascinating.
• Blogging kickstarted a revolution in hyperconnectivity and communication via the web – it was the spark of life that internet was missing…From the Blogosphere a new plane of existence has arisen –like a good version of the matrix –where we are all enhanced by unlimited access to knowledge and experience and had the ability to add our own.
• Blog: Noun: A personal website that provides updated headlines and news articles of other sites that are of interest to the user, also may include journal entries, commentaries and recommendations compiled by the user; also written Weblog, Web log Verb., To compose and publish a blog entry
• Link Whore: A blogger who will compromise every possible principle he or she once had in order to get more bloggers to link to him/her. Also: link slut.
- Biz Stone -
April 25, 2022
Loved this book. Read it in 2022, long after the era and heyday of blogging when it was written. Got nostalgia from it, as one who first blogged on Blogger circa 2006.
I enjoyed some of the detailed history/back story of Blogger and the general insights and zeitgeist of blogging around 2003-4.
Got several nice quotes from the book. Even got some HTML inspiration.
I will probably blog my further thoughts about this book on my blog Jason Journals. Of course. Seriously.
I enjoyed some of the detailed history/back story of Blogger and the general insights and zeitgeist of blogging around 2003-4.
Got several nice quotes from the book. Even got some HTML inspiration.
I will probably blog my further thoughts about this book on my blog Jason Journals. Of course. Seriously.
February 21, 2008
Who Let The Blogs Out?, by Biz Stone, is a great introduction to the world of blogs and blogging. It starts off a little slow with a broad background into blogs and blog networks, it picks up with a lot of practical information about blogging. How to use HTML/CSS to style your blog, how to monetize your blog via Google Adsense and the Amazon Associates program, whether or not to turn on comments, Biz has a point of view on it all, and it is explained very plainly here. I've taken some of his advice, I'm joining the Google Adsense and Amazon Affiliates programs, and have informed my employer formally of my blog and its POV. Good practical advice.
He also delves into the social aspect of blogging, showing the wisdom of crowds and how it works together to point out the cracks in mainstream journalism - the blogosphere putting pressure on then-Senator Trent Lott for racist statements made at a birthday party for Strom Thurmond, largely unreported by traditional media, exposed by blogs, leading to his resignation from the Senate; also, how the nature of blogs and the connections between them make blogs "weak tie machines", as mentioned in The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki (ordered it from Amazon, haven't read it yet. :-)
Biz finishes up by talking about Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, and the three types of people needed to make an impact: connectors (people with lots of friends), mavens (people with accumulated knowledge), and salesmen (people who can sell the idea). Blogs certainly allow for these three types of people to connect and become interwoven.
I like this book overall, it started slowly but really picked up. I liked reading what I've learned by osmosis :-), it was nice to see my assumptions validated, and to color in a bit more history of the world of weblogs.
He also delves into the social aspect of blogging, showing the wisdom of crowds and how it works together to point out the cracks in mainstream journalism - the blogosphere putting pressure on then-Senator Trent Lott for racist statements made at a birthday party for Strom Thurmond, largely unreported by traditional media, exposed by blogs, leading to his resignation from the Senate; also, how the nature of blogs and the connections between them make blogs "weak tie machines", as mentioned in The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki (ordered it from Amazon, haven't read it yet. :-)
Biz finishes up by talking about Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, and the three types of people needed to make an impact: connectors (people with lots of friends), mavens (people with accumulated knowledge), and salesmen (people who can sell the idea). Blogs certainly allow for these three types of people to connect and become interwoven.
I like this book overall, it started slowly but really picked up. I liked reading what I've learned by osmosis :-), it was nice to see my assumptions validated, and to color in a bit more history of the world of weblogs.
May 25, 2008
Who Let the Blogs Out: a Hyperconnected Peek at the World of Weblogs by Biz Stone (fast read, pretty decent, informative book, can't say i'm incredibly fond of the title...) don't blog drunk~that's probably good advise though i don't always take it and some of my most interesting writing has come out of my less sober moments~though i would say it's best to reread the drafts over once your sober before posting and/or publishing (or showing to someone else if it is some other form of writing). This book is actually quite useful for defining blogs, constructing them, etc, etc, etc. It is written in a conversational, witty style (much like a blog itself) and though i'm sure the material will quickly grow quite dated i found it quite useful. Chapters include:
Who let the Blogs Out? (there that phrase is again~truly grating on my nerves~a basic intro to the birth of blogs, different types, blah, blah, blah.....); Blog This! A Cultural Style Guide; Why Would Anyone Want to Blog?; Geeking Out: Starting a Blog, Playing with HTML; Blogging in Business (for a further expansion on this try); and Politics and Pupils: The Impact of Blogging on Society. There is also an intro by Wil Wheaton (you TNG, or everyone really~its quite interesting, should also check out his blog). Stone suggests that even as blogs may be experiencing their waning phase the "blogosphere" may actually fulfill the Internet's original promise of connecting/interconnecting the "whole wide world". Stone also claims blogging will make you smarter because of all of the reading and writing that you are doing, i'm not sure that it actually increases your intelligence (there are so many factors involved there) but i do know that increased reading and writing is always a good thing :)
Who let the Blogs Out? (there that phrase is again~truly grating on my nerves~a basic intro to the birth of blogs, different types, blah, blah, blah.....); Blog This! A Cultural Style Guide; Why Would Anyone Want to Blog?; Geeking Out: Starting a Blog, Playing with HTML; Blogging in Business (for a further expansion on this try); and Politics and Pupils: The Impact of Blogging on Society. There is also an intro by Wil Wheaton (you TNG, or everyone really~its quite interesting, should also check out his blog). Stone suggests that even as blogs may be experiencing their waning phase the "blogosphere" may actually fulfill the Internet's original promise of connecting/interconnecting the "whole wide world". Stone also claims blogging will make you smarter because of all of the reading and writing that you are doing, i'm not sure that it actually increases your intelligence (there are so many factors involved there) but i do know that increased reading and writing is always a good thing :)
March 26, 2008
Blogs - short for "Web Logs" or online journals - are all the rage on the World Wide Web. They are a quick method of publishing anything you want on the Web with little to no supervision, which can be a good and a bad thing. And they allow people to share personal insights, photos, product reviews, political views, propaganda, and just about anything else you can imagine with an audience of millions. Stone, one of the early developers of Blog software, examines this phenomenon from its humble beginnings to its fever-pitched current adoption rates. He looks at how it got started and why its an effective communication tool. He also offers tips on how to blog safely (without ticking off family, friends, and co-workers) and how to get started if you're a novice. In all honesty, it's a fun book to read; however, the technology is advancing so rapidly and the blog landscape changes so readily that this book, despite only being a year or two old, is far too outdated. The tips and tricks remain timeless, but so much has happened that this really should be an electronic book available on Stone's Web site that he can update on a regular basis.
November 22, 2007
From a blog post I wrote in 2005:
I found this book while scanning the new non-fiction section at the library. The deciding factor on checking it out was that the forward was written by Wil Wheaton. That's right, Ensign Crusher is a blogger and damn proud of it. Author Biz Stone weaves the history of blogs, his path to publishing that he traces to blogging and an inside peak into the cast of characters in the blog world into a fascinating book. He also gives tips on generating traffic to your blog, etiquette and making money through blogging (mental note-look into that!).
Stone mentions several cool blogs that I now check daily (including his) and it really revved up my interest in this technological phenomenon. I dug this book a lot - so much so that I may buy a copy for my personal library.
I found this book while scanning the new non-fiction section at the library. The deciding factor on checking it out was that the forward was written by Wil Wheaton. That's right, Ensign Crusher is a blogger and damn proud of it. Author Biz Stone weaves the history of blogs, his path to publishing that he traces to blogging and an inside peak into the cast of characters in the blog world into a fascinating book. He also gives tips on generating traffic to your blog, etiquette and making money through blogging (mental note-look into that!).
Stone mentions several cool blogs that I now check daily (including his) and it really revved up my interest in this technological phenomenon. I dug this book a lot - so much so that I may buy a copy for my personal library.
June 2, 2010
This book had a lot of great ideas, but no nitty-gritty details on how to make them happen. As a new(ish) blogger looking to learn how to improve my online presence and, yes, make some money, this was not the right tool. That said, it was an interesting read. Stone covers both some historical info on how and why the blogosphere was born, and also some interesting sociological insights about how it affects our world and our psychology. However, I am still pretty clueless about how to find my own part in it.
February 24, 2012
Good read. Gives a short history of blogs and what is current with bloggin (2004). Biz wrote this in a humorous, lighthearted way without much tech talk so who can operate a computer can understand it. Also he gives still semi relevant tips on making money with your blog. A good read for new bloggers and those who want to know more about them.
July 22, 2016
No doubt this was all things hip and current when first published, but now it's so outdated as to be useless except as a history of the early years of blogging. It's pre-Twitter, pre-Facebook, and doesn't mention WordPress or Weebly.
Apart from that, it's well written and easy to read. Just dated.
Apart from that, it's well written and easy to read. Just dated.
June 8, 2008
This is a good introduction book to blogging, but only if you’ve never blogged in your life. It offers an insider’s view, he did help start-up Xanga afterall, but if you already have a blog and know what you’re doing, this book is not for you.
February 26, 2009
Published in 2004, it already feels a little dated, but it is good background for a beginner like myself. I really liked the bit about using some basic HTML to fix up the writing style when writing blogs.
July 24, 2007
When I was first setting up my blog, this resource was invaluable to me.. lots of good stuff in here.
July 29, 2009
This was a fun fast read. I learned some things, even tho I know the cyber world changes on a daily basis. It was well written and easy to get thru.
September 9, 2013
Although published almost 10 years ago, it has very useful advice, sites to visit, and code to use for newbies like me. Also with a forward by Wil Wheaton - now have to check out his blog :-).
December 18, 2007
Boring and repetitive but there are some interesting anecdotes buried in the prose.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews