Blogging About Books About Blogging
I have never been a fan of the "dummies" books and honestly never understood how a publisher that unequivocally calls its audience Stoopid on the cover of every book could possibly become popular, yet the bright yellow tomes on a huge range of topics have become ubiquitous. And sometimes, though certainly not always, the books themselves are quite good.
Blogging For Dummies is a comprehensive reference that begins by defining the term blog and proceeds methodically to tell you most everything you need to know about them. Brad Hill takes a very humorous and self-deprecating tone which somewhat makes up for the very hand-holding, step-by-step ‘software manual’ style these books inevitably adopt.
I particularly enjoyed the discussion of the various options for starting a blog: from the social networks on MSN Spaces and Yahoo 360 and Google’s less sociable and slightly geekier Blogger (all free) to paid Type Pad accounts, to using Movable Type or Word Press pre-installed on a blogging specialist web host’s server to downloading and installing one of these programs on your own on a general web hosting server. I started this blog on a whim, without ever considering what options were available and am quite pleased to realize that had I reviewed all of these options before starting I very likely still would have chosen Blogger.
Other sections cover the mechanics of day to day blogging, the use of RSS and other syndication services, publicizing and promoting your blog, netiquette for bloggers and, finally monetizing your blog with ads. This volume would be most useful for someone who has already begun blogging and wants to get a better understanding of what it’s all about and helpful to prospective bloggers who prefer to learn before they leap. Recommended.
Publishing a Blog with Blogger is a highly visual, well-written and concise guide to doing exactly what the title says. Elizabeth Castro does not spare a word or a pixel for the history of blogging, the possibilities of using other hosts and software platforms or anything else except showing you precisely, step-by-step how to build and manage a Blogger blog. This book would be excellent for helping someone like my mother, who has never blogged before, to make their first effort. (My mom has started reading here lately and I hope she will see this suggestion– she has become a great photographer in recent years and I would love to be able to visit her blog and see her latest pictures every day!) Highly Recommended.
The Best of Blogs seems uncertain what it wants to be– a guide for new bloggers, a history of the medium or a directory listing of interesting and unusual blogs. And in its indecision, it fails in all three areas. The history and general explanations, occupying a small section at the beginning of the book are cursory and provide little useful information. The meat of the book, occupying the middle two thirds of the 320 pages consists of a listing of blogs in various categories, which do not seem particularly well chosen. The authors seem to be most interested in parenting and child oriented blogs as well as football and sports centered blogs. If these are not your particular interests this section will not be all that helpful. (I also believe that printed directories of online content are necessarily obsolete 60 seconds after they come off the press and a waste of paper under the best of circumstances, even when the listings are well-chosen, which these are not.) The final section of the book, about 50 pages addresses the particulars of creating your own blog. This section feels like an after-thought and would have very limited utility for a new blogger. NOT Recommended.
All three of these books and many other books about blogging can be found in your public library at Dewey Decimal Number 006.7.
Reblogged this on Ransae's Blog.
I am yet to enter blogging but all these wonderful posts are sure enough gonna bring me to writing very soon. Thanks for the share. Like you’ve mentioned it still is very much relevant.
Srivatsan, If you’ve looked at blogging and thought “hey, I bet I could do that and that would be SO COOL” by all means go for it. If you’re not passionate about using a blog to say things you would not otherwise say, I honestly don’t think a blog is any way necessary to be successful on social media. Bloggers are often an errr uhh Interesting bunch of people. But I don’t push anyone to join that strange tribe if their heart is not in it.
I and Nic are in the same boat, I started on Blogger, but had it stolen and used on the other side of the world. Then I went to Word Press and that hasn’t happend. I now have had over 20,000 readers in the last year, so I guess I have accomplished what I set out to do. I have learned a lot this past year, I teach social media and have been asked to teach blogging, so maybe that will be the next step.
LOL. Better you than me on teaching blogging. I know a lot about it, but I think my life would be far too constrained if I let the mechanics of blogging be the main thing that I talk about. I Could teach blogging or social networking. And I am trying to reach out to authors and entrepreneurs who need good advice that is specifically tailored to their particular needs.
Great post. I’m glad you reviewed the book and saved all of us from suffering through it.
Like you, I find the Dummies title insulting. I’ve never bought a single Dummies book due to that very fact.
As far as finding the best blogging platform, somehow I stumbled my way to WordPress by accident. It was a good accident. WP has kindly allowed me to post over 4,000 blogs over the past few years.
When I started with WordPress I didn’t even realize there were other blogging platforms – silly me – but at the time it was what I was advised to do by a blogging expert.
Since then I also found Blogger and love it. I cheat on WordPress from time to time with Blogger, but it’s hard to walk away from thousands of blogs.
~Karen
I started on Blogspot. I’ve had a self-hosted WordPress blog for three plus years, and am currently on WP.com because it is the best for my particular needs right now. There are some bloggers who really would be better served using Blogspot and I would be the first to help them do so, if that was what would suit their particular purposes. I heart WordPress. But you’ll never hear me say that it’s perfect for everyone
Thanks for sharing. I think they are pretty much outdated. For me, I adopted a method called learning by doing. Just write something, and learning from audience and posts from blogging communities. Any book would be outdated after publishing.
Why do you think they are outdated, Nicolas? Has blogging changed that much in three years? Are the basic things you need to know to be a successful blogger that different today? The Dummies book has probably been updated but if you click the book cover image, it will show you the nearest copy in a public library. And if the book is in your public library, that means that a professional librarian believes it has information which remains valuable and timely to the patrons to whom it is offered. #justsaying
I’m with you on this one. The basics of blogging haven’t undergone some radical reconstruction that changed the game forever. Since I started way back when, the biggest change has been sharing buttons for all these nifty platforms we have now. Well written books always hold value – and for noobs the basics are always the same.
Exactly, Mandy. You could be a librarian. Or play one online
I spent years working down a sinkhole of a niche before deciding my niche was no niche – unless you consider goofy random musings a niche. We all do things we would change – for me it was what I did at Mardi Gras in 95 – they were just plastic beads!!! I left feeling so used….lol
Mandy, your blog strikes me as a cross between Readers Digest and The National Enquirer. But I have to say I am just THRILLED and having so much fun in the no niche niche and know that my audience on my new blog will be exponentially bigger than I would EVER have achieved on the books blog.
I like anything with pictures. Words confuse me and when I get confused I get scared. When I get scared – I might poo a little. That demonstrates the one thing I learned about blogging (at least to my long suffering audience) any post with “poo” in it does well. Identify your audience and give them what they want. Most valuable lesson I ever got from a blogging book.
The most valuable lesson I’ve learned about blogging is that the personal niche is a great fit for me at this point in time. I’m not saying I regret the three years I REALLY worked on the book review blog, but man if I had known then what I know now…..plus ca meme chose….
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Thanks for the tips on the blogging books. I agree with you about the Dummy books, the name has a shock value, and the yellow makes it feel like it is informational – like the yellow pages. It was a very good marketing idea.
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Ron, honey, you are way smarter than you give yourself credit for. And I love your blog. You and Bev were what got me started with this one.
Thanks for your input, Chris, I appreciate it. And I hope I made clear that I did like the book, just not the title. A couple of other dummies books and one of the competing “complete idiot’s” books caught my eye today and will be the subject of a post later this week.
Joyzeeboy hit the nail on the head – we are all Dummies about something, and having the right guide is often the key to learning something new.Chris WebbWiley Publishing
I gotta get me that “Blogging for Dummies” book because a) I do (blog) and b) I am (a dummy about it).Or I could just annoy the hell out of Bev with all my questions.