Blogosphere: Best of Blogs by Peter Kuhns and Adrienne Crew. What the heck am I doing reading a book on blogs? This must be the ultimate in navel gazing or something. I mean, I've been doing this for years so I must know what I'm doing, right? Anyways, I was curious so I picked it up.
There are basically three sections to the book. The first part is a short history of the blog, the second is the most lengthy which reads more like an abbreviated yellow pages of representative blogs in different topics, and the third part is on how to make your own blog. The authors also added that they had bonus chapters (13 and 14) up on their website (blogsbestof.com) but I got an error when I last tried accessing it. I tried looking it up on Google's cache but I don't see any links up on the cached page either. All I found was a bonus section of chapter 9 which was just an extended list of environmental blogs. I find this sort of silly--why write a book about blogs when the blog about the book on blogs isn't even working properly?
As for the meat of the book, I was not surprised by the listings of entertainment, hobby, or political blogs. But parenting blogs? Sports blogs? How popular are those topics in the blogosphere anyway? I'm sorry, but I don't see how you can justify filling up about one-fourth of all the listings with parenting and sports blogs even if a lot of people are interested in parenting and sports. There are tons of other subjects out there. And then there is this section about "faking it", i.e. pretending to read blogs to seem cool. I am not impressed.
I couldn't believe that they left out some essential topics. Okay, so these are geeky topics and perhaps the authors thought that only non-geeks would pick up the book--but dang it, blogs wouldn't be possible without geeks. Where are the technology blogs--especially the ones that started it all? The linklogs? The science blogs? (No, sticking a chemist blogger in the middle of a list of medical doctors does not count.) How about the blog carnivals that highlight the best posts in the blogosphere? Photoblogs? Group blogs? But judging from one of the book's blog entries about hoping to include an extra section about bloggers getting married in the next edition--I am not sure whether the authors really quite get it or they're pandering to the clueless (and decidedly dull) crowd.
Well, sure. I will be the first to admit that I am mostly indifferent to parenting blogs and I find sports blogs to be completely boring. I know I am biased towards blogs with supposedly geekier subjects. But I'm not asking that all the parenting blogs to be eliminated from the list--just that the section be scaled down in proportion to the number of other topics.
After all, if you're writing a book about the blogosphere for the public in general, it seems completely remiss to ignore entire subjects. Then it's not really the blogosphere--it's just a part of the blogosphere. To be more accurate, they could have just named the book "The Best of Parenting and Sports Blogs."
Thanks for checking out the book. Sorry that it didn't cover the topics that you were most interested in.
But here's the thing, we wrote the book for people who do not hang out on the Internet or even know that much about computers. We veered away from tech topics because we figured people who regularly read blogs probably woudn't be interested in such a basic book. Furthermore,our research into the blog book market--way back in 2004- revealed that most books published at that time exclusively covered topics like technology, politics and the Internet so we created our book for the abolute beginner/computer phobe.
The website had some technical difficulties around the end of September and we lost all our entries. So we went off line around October 1st in order to repopulate the site. We're in the process of uploading the PDFs as well.
Sincerely, Adrienne Crew, co-author of Blogosphere: Best of Blogs
