Clear Blogging-- Bob Walsh-- Review and Comments

I have been reading Bob Walsh Clear Blogging How People Blogging Are Changing the World and How You Can Join Them. This is a technical book, I am going to include what I got out of the book as well as reviewing the book. So far, I have rejoined Technorati at the suggestion of the book.

I also found a decent book listed here Random House, Handy Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation. He also suggests The Elements of Style. The book describes a lot of basic ideas on how to write a good blog.

He also gives an excellent example of a fake blake and a splog on page P.70. On P.76 he introduces one of the first blogs on the internet http://www.megnut.com . I am rather surprised that it is a simple two column blog. I often find three column blogs hard to navigate. I have to move around the screen to see all of the content. This can be quite inconvenient. There is also a short interview of Meg Hourihan.

The book is full of interviews of a variety of different blog luminaries Seth Godin, Kurt Opsahl from the Electronic Freedom Foundation, Darren Rowse founder of Problogger, Shari Olivieri of Sharma Designs, and many more blogging people. Almost all of the interviews are short and to the point and quite interesting. I could recommend the book just for the interviews of high profile bloggers.

There are also a lot of different types of blogs covered, everything from corporate blogs to lawyer blogs, doctor blogs, clergy blogging, kosher food blogs. In addition specialized resources like blogs for lawyers, or blawgs are covered http://www.abanet.org/genpractice/resources/blawgs.html

Two blogging job boards are shown, http://jobs.problogger.net and http://performancing.com are talked about. This book explains a lot about what makes a blog professional. It is clearly meant for both the beginner and the more advanced blogger.

I just finished reading an interview with David Sifry, Founder of Technorati on P.156. He points out that the internet is about people and interacting with people more than anything else. Following this on P. 172 is an interview with Steve Olechowski, Founder and COO, Feedburner, Inc.

A lot of the major technology is quite well covered. But, this book is not just about technology. It is about writing well so you can connect with the "blogosphere". It gives suggestions on how to spellcheck and grammar check blogs, as well as choose topics to write about. The trick of outlining a subject a day; Monday-- tech day, Tuesday-- writing day, Wednesday-- Humor day is suggested. I think I will pass on this one, I would much rather be extemperaneous in my writing.

There is quite a bit on successful blogging. I am learning as I read along with the book. I am not finished with it today. I will continue writing about it as I read more material.

I read a little more and learned some interesting ideas. It takes about a 1000 visitors per day before you can get any significant amount of money through advertising. To earn a living from a blog, it takes about 10,000 users per day. The two main guaranteed streams of income are Google Adsense and Amazon Affiliates. These take a long time to build up. It took several years for Problogger, Darren Rowse to develop his income. There is an interview of Darren Rowse on Pp. 258-262 which is quite interesting.

The last chapters concern reaching out to other people. Most of this is your standard material, join feedburner, remember to respond to comments, be a guest blogger and similar advice. I did submit my blog to a new blog directory at their suggestion, blogopolis.com.

This book was enjoyable and informative to read. It gives a lot of useful information and suggestions about how to improve your blogging. It looks to be right on target.

Thoughts for Today

Hello,
Good afternoon to you all. I am a bit lethargic today. I have been so for the last few days. I took a look through a variety of websites. There were a few interesting articles which I saw while looking around the web.

The first is an article by Cory Doctorow, Put Not Your Faith in Ebooks. I found it quite entertaining. He correctly says that we should not put too much faith in ebooks being any more than a niche. Even regular books are increasingly becoming a niche products with many Americans not reading as much. http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2008/03/cory-doctorow-put-not-your-faith-in.html

I also was reading Library Journal online. They have an article about downgrading librarians pay. I think many things which are being said in the article are correct. However, I think the profession needs to take a good hard look at how it is being managed lately. There are a lot of problems. http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6538702.html

I could not imagine being in their position. It would be quite hard.

I also took a bit of time to look at places to find books. I put Elizabeth Moon's new book on hold Victory Conditions. It is the fifth book in the series.

I have a bunch of new items to pick up. I will write about them later in the day.

Acacia Book One The War With the Mein by David Durham, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan, Blogging For Dummies, 2nd Edition by Susannah Gardner and Shane Birley, and Clear Blogging by Bob Walsh have come in for me to read. I am not sure which book I will start on.

There are not a whole lot of books available about blogging at the library. Blogging For Dummies seems to be the book which most libraries have. Some people hate the title of the For Dummies series and refuse to read the series. They don't like being called dummies or even better Complete Idiots, another series. Most people don't seem to mind the title, however.

I tried reading Blogging for Dummies on the train. I found it to be a little dry. It had all the things which you needed to know to start blogging, but it was not very entertaining. It was essentially a beginning technical manual for blogging. After a bit of time, I put it back in my bag. I am going to return it tomorrow. In contrast, after reading the first chapter of Clear Blogging, I found it very entertaining. It even had an interesting interview in the first chapter. I will continue reading it on my train ride in from work.

I did, however, learn a new term, evergreening. This is taking old articles that are generic like about your neighbors car, or your dog spot, or the history of pet rocks and putting them in your blog if you can't think of anything new to write. I promise that I won't do this. I am not particularly good at being generic; I don't have a dog spot, I don't like pet rocks or chia pets, and I try to write something new every day.

I imagine many of the big news agencies have filing cabinets full of these old articles kept in an abandoned missile silo in Kansas left over from the cold war. Whenever they need filler they call up a guy named Bob and he sends them an appropriately heartwarming article for the day.