In This Guide

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Weblogs On the Web

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Weblogs In Books

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Weblogs In Your Wardrobe

On the Web
The best place to find the most up-to-date information on blogging is on the web itself. We've assembled this set of links pointing to articles and essays that try to answer the question "what are weblogs?". We hope that you'll find them enlightening. Whenever we mention someone's name, we link it to their weblog if they have one.

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blogcount

A blog that asks: "How many blogs and bloggers? How big the blogosphere?"

·

Blogroots

The companion web site for the book We Blog, to "continue the conversation the book begins".

·	Deep Thinking About Weblogs

Andrew Grumet attempts to answer the questions: What are weblogs? What's the big deal? Why should we pay attention?

·	John Patrick on Weblogs

An eWeek interview with former IBM VP of Technology John Patrick on blogs and business: "We all know somebody in our organization who knows everything that's going on. "Just ask Sally. She'll know." There's always a Sally, and those are the people who become the bloggers."

·	Klogging 101: What, Why and How

Phil Wolff's presentation slides on klogs ("knowledge logging") and klogging.

·	My Blog, My Outboard Brain

Cory Doctorow, editor of the Boing Boing blog and self-confessed "committed infovore", writes about how blogs are more than just online journals, but an excellent means of storing and retrieving information. In this testimony, he says that the act of regular blogging has lent focus to his information-gathering and increased the volume and quantity of the information that he produces.

·	Personal Knowledge Publishing and Its Uses in Research

Sebastian Paquet's essay on what weblogs are, their history, their use and how they foster quality.

·	Weblogs as Lab Notebooks

James McGee observes that the power of science comes from sharing ideas, and that weblogs make excellent tools for doing that.

·	What We're Doing When We Blog

Meg Hourihan writes:

When we talk about weblogs, we're talking about a way of organizing information, independent of its topic. What we write about does not define us as bloggers; it's how we write about it (frequently, ad nauseam, peppered with links).

Weblogs simply provide the framework, as haiku imposes order on words. The structure of the documents we're creating enable us to build our social networks on top of it -- the distributed conversations, the blog-rolling lists, and the friendships that begin online and are solidified over a "bloggers dinner" in the real world.

·	Wikipedia's definition for the term "Weblog"

Wikipedia is a wiki, an online encyclopedia where all the readers can add or edit entries. This is their definition of the word "Weblog", complete with links to other references.

In Books
Choosing books on computer topics, especially rapidly-changing ones like blogging, is always a risky venture. The racks in the "discounted" section of your local bookstore and those "giant book sale" liquidation outlets groan with the weight of books that are either out-of-date (consider books about old versions of operating systems or other software) or no longer relevant (books on technologies that never caught on, such as WAP or "push" technology). If you're looking for up-to-date information on blogging, your best bet is still the Web.

That being said, books have certain advantages over online resources: they don't require power, they're at least as portable as notebook computers if not more so, they never crash, the material will always be there as long as you posess the book, you don't require an Internet connection, and you can take them anywhere -- even the tub or other hazardous places where you'd never dare drag a computer.

The following books are what we feel are the best books on the subject of blogging. They're all written by authors whose weblogs we like and who've taken some care to write a book with at least some material that will remain relevant over the years. The title of each book links to the book's site or Amazon.com page, and we've linked the names of each author and editor links to his or her weblog(s).





Essential Blogging
Edited by Shelley Powers
Written by Cory Doctorow, J. Scott Johnson, Mena Trott, Benjamin Trott and Rael Dornfest
O'Reilly and Associates, 2002

One of the book's chapters has been published online:

·	Advanced Blogger [PDF document] (Chapter 6)

Never Threaten to Eat Your Co-Workers: Best of Blogs
Edited by Alan Graham and Bonnie Burton
Apress, 2004



The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice for Creating and Maintaining Your Blog
Written by Rebecca Blood
Perseus Publishing, 2002



We Blog
Written by Paul Bausch, Matthew Haughey and Meg Hourihan
John Wiley and Sons, 2002
Three of the book's chapters have been published online:

·	Navigating the Blog Universe (Chapter 3)

·	Using Blogs in Business (Chapter 8)

·	Blog Publictity and Syndication (Chapter 9)

In your Wardrobe


The "I'm Blogging This" T-Shirt
Okay, so it's not really reading material. We still think it's a cool T-shirt.



Furious Bear
An online store with lots of weblog-relating clothing and other paraphernalia.