scholar @ jklmelton

Is your blog getting you down? Does your blog suffer from bloglessness? Have you been blogging for a while now, but haven’t quite found your blogging mojo? If any of the above includes you, you may want to check out Dispatches from Blogistan by Suzanne Stefanac. While it may sound a bit strange to write a book about blogs, I thought it was honest of her to acknowledge that. Personally, I appreciated having the tome so I could read it wherever I wanted.

The book starts off with an interesting overview of how people have communicated their ideas through the ages (I’d like to have the timeline, printed over several pages, of the history of discourse in a poster in my office). Stefanac then describes several of the main genre types of blogs: blogs with links to important sites, online diaries (I would have to say El Viajero fits best in this category), meeting places for particular topics (otaku comes to mind), places to get news, and blogs for those with some kind of agenda. These chapters include copious example sites and have some interesting interviews with major bloggers.

The eighth chapter is a must-read section for anyone who has not yet started a blog or wants to make a move to another system. Relevant topics include free or paid services, sharing your (or following others’) posts, and trying to make some money with your blog (easier said than done).

Chapter nine runs down some of the important elements to include, configure, tweak, set, upload, write, cut, tag, archive, show, copyright, license, design, plan, broadcast, arrange, edit, entice with, link to, syndicate, make searchable, and, finally, test. Chapter 10 has a good overview of what to consider when you are actually writing your blog entries. The tips include getting started with the white screen in front of you, writing eye-catching ledes, adding useful tags, and managing the overall content on your pages.

Chapter 11 (not the bankrupcy law) provides some useful tips for getting the most out of your blog (if you’ve been here before, you may have already noticed some changes here and there). Tips include carefully choosing keywords to use in most of your entries; Stefanac notes that planning ahead will allow you to place the keywords in such critical places as your domain name and title bar (I’ve missed out on those). Being active in other blogs and blogging in general are helpful as well. By reading and commenting on other blogs and adding links to important posts in yours, you can raise your ranking. Other tips are registering your domain with various blog search engines, adding key posts to social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, and subscribing to your own feed(s).

The next chapter gives an overview of some of the online legal issues to consider. Copyright, fair use, intellectual property, creative commons, and parody are all given varying degrees of coverage. Defamation and libel are given space; anyone covering news or people should know this information as a minimum. There are also guidelines on writing about work and how to get journalists’ credentials to get your foot in the door of serious reporting. The final chapter is on some of sites in the second wave of the web: Web 2.0 (you know who you are )

Interspersed amongst each chapter are links to example blogs and useful sites. All in all, this is a great book. My only gripe is that there is a lot of redundancy in places, as if each chapter was written separately with no thought to what has been or what will be in the rest of the book. A little more thought during the editing process would help to give this book’s readers a little more credit for being able to remember what they have read.