The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog [Paperback]

In the 190 pages of text, Blood demonstrates over and again that blogging is all about self-discovery. You will most likely not find a huge audience, she tells us, but you will find that you are a better writer than you were before you started blogging. You probably won't be a huge influence on public policy, but you will hone your reasoning and filtering skills by engaging the topics you care about. You may not ever make a penny from your blog, but you can improve your reputation and your standing in your industry by becoming a resource and a reference point.

For the most part, bloggers seem to be thoughtful people and I cannot imagine any weblog writer -- or any online diarist or creative writer, for that matter -- fiinishing this book without a renewed belief in the purpose and value of their endeavor.

As the book is clearly targeted at an audience that is already at least familiar with, and most likely patrons of, weblogs, I was a bit hesitant of the tone being too boosterish. Most of the "For Dummies" books (not that this is one) spend time trying to convince their audience to be enthused about a topic that they've already (1) bought a book about and (2) accepted their "dummy" status regarding. This book assumes you're already sold. While there is undoubtedly enthusiasm, there's a healthy dose of reality about what it takes to start and maintain a decent blog. ("If, after spending your workday at the computer, the last thing you want to do when you get home is turn on your PC, you should probably take up knitting or join a film club instead.")

There is a deliberate aversion to getting too in-depth with any of the weblogging tools, which isn't surprising given the fact that Rebecca's Pocket is maintained with manually created HTML and FTP. I'd suggest that this is one area (the *only* area, actually) where the author's proclivities diverged from the interests many readers would have, as the cursory mentions of the tools as being essentially fungible ignore the reality that the overwhelming majority of webloggers use one of the handful of prominent tools like Blogger, Radio, LiveJournal and Movable Type. I'm willing to cede the argument that a discussion of those tools might have taken the book from Handbook territory into the Technical Guide realm.

The most cogent and important thoughts in The Weblog Handbook have nothing to do with "Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining" a weblog, they have to do with understanding the social context and media implications of weblogs, both as readers and writers/editors. The first chapter details how weblogs promote social literacy, and the motif recurs throughout the book, prompting some thought-provoking sections on weblog ethics and responsible methods of promoting one's own site.

I was concerned, on my first reading, with the few mentions of specific URLs and events like the World Trade Center attacks as points of reference. Another trip through the text removes a lot of my concern, as the points probably stood out more to me due to my perspective, and they're only used as context, and any worries that they might seem dated are silly in the context of a book that's about a phenomenon that's only a few years old. The whole *book* will, hopefully, seem dated in a relatively short time. The fact that Weblog Madness is mentioned a few times during the text and has since shut down only underscores the inherently transient nature of the web, and doesn't negate the value of the ideas expressed. It might serve the book well to have the list all of the ...referenced URLs for each chapter, along with (perhaps) updated links.

Most of the audience will also probably be concerned about a preponderance of "a-list" mentions or inside jokes, and there are, honestly, none. Fortunately absent, also, is any significant attention to the loud but worthless in-fighting that plagues a few small clusters of the weblog community. There's a healthy respect for the fact that these never affect the other 99% of the weblog world. I'd raise a bit of contention over the book being labelled a "handbook", as my perception of that format is a little more structured and textbookish. That's a small hair to split, though, as the narrative tone suits the topics perfectly.

So, was there anything revelatory in the book for me? Not really. But I've been doing this for, well... about as long as RCB. I didn't expect to have some "A-ha!" moment, especially since I've had the privilege of discussing a lot of these topics with her in person. For the book's *intended* audience, however, I think there's a great deal of insight, ideas that I know I didn't stumble across until I'd been doing this for a year or two. Considering the book's cheaper than a single CD, it seems likely that a lot of people who either just jumped into the blog world, or are just about to, might spring for it to give them a leg up. I hope they do; They'll be better webloggers for having read it.

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.

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.

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.

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.