Customer Reviews

Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I have been building websites for about a year. Because of my past knowledge, the first 2/3 of the book was stuff I already knew.

The cool thing about this book is that it can take a person from absolute beginer to experienced blogger in less than a week.

The book is filled with illistrations and can be easily be read in less than a day. If you are new to blogs this book would be excellent. If you already have some experience with blogs this book might be alright, but keep in mind it starts off assuming no knowledge of the internet.

Also, his genius thing is just a joke...he does not appear full of himself or take himself too seriously. Straightforward info where he does not talk over your head.

When I was curious about the social phenomenom of blogging, I looked through several books on the subject. The best of the lot was Blogging by Biz Stone. This book was very quick reading and helped me select a blogging software, which is a big decision you have to make right off the bat. You need to get a feel for whether you want to have somebody else host your blog or host it yourself. There is a decision to make on how much of the administrative tasks you want to take on. Biz's book allowed me to examine the popular blog providers and ferret out which provider was best for me. For someone that doesn't know HTML or CSS, there is a cut to the chase section to show you the basics. There are also some more advanced topics like group blogging, blogging for dollars, corporate blogging, syndication, and increasing blog site traffic. I highly recommend Blogging if you want to learn the basics of blogging in an easily readable book. Thanks, Biz.

I'd only been blogging for about a month and decided I needed a little help because I had NO IDEA how to change or format my blog. Genius Strategies led me into the murky world of HTML tags and other technicalities. This book gave me some excellent ideas to tweak my blog format and has given me the confidence to try some things which I might not have otherwise experimented with. I recommend this book if you're a beginner or a seasoned blogger. The technical information is top-notch and the resources in the appendix will occupy you for hours.

This book tries to cover all aspects of blogging, from a bit of history, through creating and managing a small personal journal, to using blog technology as a corporate marketing tool. Along the way it covers an interesting variety of hints, tips and suggestions on how to make a blog look stylish, how to draw more visitors, and so on. It even covers an overview of using and writing blog-related applications and some thoughts about what might come next.

This book does well at communicating the excitement of blogging. If you are not raring to have a go by the end of the book, you're probably not cut out for life on the web. But beware, The world of blogging is astonishingly fast moving and fashion-conscious, so a book such as this can very quickly loose its cutting edge.

The main limitation of this book is the way it concentrates so much on one blogging system (Blogger), and assumes a particular way of working. On the up-side, the system it describes is probably the most popular, but that can so easily change.

If you would like to run a blog using the Blogger software or the Blog*Spot hosting service, and want to really get the most out of it, this is a great book. If you might be interested in other software and approaches, it's less vital, but still contains a lot of useful and interesting material.

This book is neither bad or great.
If you are new to blogging mess around, see how it works with a free blogger. If you need more you can move over to the likes of MovableType or wordpress. If you use blogger, Elizabeth Castro has a new book about a specific solution "publishing a blog with Blogger" which goes into more actual detail about getting blogger to work for you. It is better. Mess around and read lots of other blogs. This book is really worth a miss.

For beginners, a good overview of the blogging phenomenon and a primer for what you need to get one going. The book is an easy read and should get you up and running before you're done.

The author is excited about blogs and brings it to a head with practical steps. It does concentrate on the Blogger family of software, but does mention some of the other options, plus quick overviews on HTML and CSS.

Get learning on blogs. With this book and the web on your screen, you'll find ideas on on how to integrate this phenomenon into your business marketing strategy.

Biz Stone's "Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content" is well-written, comprehensive, thorough and entertaining. Starting from ground zero, Biz explains how to create a blog, compares blogging service providers & programs and offers suggestions generating income via a blog. He also explains how to create group and corporate blogs for more efficient teamwork and dynamic communication.

More than a basic blogging manual, Biz's book goes on to explain more complicated and sophisticated aspects of blogging such as Cascading Style Sheets, Sideblogs and Email Blogs and Syndicating A Blog. This book rapidly and easily develops the absolute beginner into a fairly sophisticated blogger.

As a community college instructor in the area of computer graphic art and multimedia design, I strongly recommend this book for people who are eager to create an attractive, complete weblog even though he or she may know very little about weblogs when they pick up the book.

This book hits the mark on blogging!

Biz has such a straight forward style it's like he's speaking to you. He doesn't take himself too seriously and it shows. More importantly though, he delivers sound advice on blogging.

Wanting to see what blogging was all about, I bought his book. I learned about blogging, html, searching and all the useful add-ons in one concise, easy to read book. I can't recommend this any higher. It's the best computer book I've read in years.

Oh yeah, I signed up for BloggerPro and have started my own blog. Way to go Biz.

Stone takes us on a tour of what is available for you to start and run your own blog website. A lot of it is surprisingly easy to master. Many content management packages have been written specifically for blogging, and come free or cheap.

He also offers suggestions about financing your site with ads; perhaps using Google. Plus ways to publicise your content. Notably by using RSS so that others coming to your site can readily subscribe. He does not go into the full details of RSS. You need a more technical text for that. But the example RSS file given here is simple enough to convey the essence of what is involved.

Unfortunately, he does not discuss blog spam. Where a spammer or a bot might write spam articles on your site. On some large blog sites, this has emerged as a problem, as spammers try to manipulate search engines to up the rankings of the spam sites.

The major problem I have with this book is that I haven't been responding to anyone else's blogs much lately or even doing much else productive. I've been reading, trying, sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding beyond my expectations.

Stone talks about "finding your voice", group blogging and many things I had not even thought about when I started my own blog. But the best part for me, were the "blog toys". The sidebars of my Blog now feel much more professional and fun at the same time. The most intersting toys I found in the book were:

1. The News Feed from moreover.com. I set up a search for "anti-war and protest and Iraq" and the list is continually updated. It's not always the news I think I'm going to get, but it's almost always something I want to read about. I now go to my own page to read the news!

2. The Search feature from Atomz. Now that I have weeks worth of archives, I wondered how I was going to find my own past posts. Part of what I've find really good about blogging is that it gets my ideas "onto paper" even when they are not fully formed. I used to have a tendency to not write things down until I was read to "compose", and of course when I felt like writing, I couldn't remember any of it. Now, with the blog, most of the "essays" I've written are still half formed, but they are here, as reference, when I do get that "urge to write". And now I can even find them! And if anyone else should care to, the search is there!

3. Metalinker, which links to other people who link to the same things you do from ThinkBlank. This adds a tag everywhere you have a link and links that to a page that shows all the other bloggers who link to the same page. Actually, I did make this work, but not the way I want, because it tags all my comment links, and side column links too. I really only want it to tag links in the main part of the blog entry. So I took it back out of my code.

4. Bookwatch. Links to people who track books and music bloggers link to from Paul Bausch. This lists the top books, CDs and movies, as in number of links, mentioned by other bloggers.

5. Create and sell your own merchandise without having to invest a penny at Cafe Press. This is really cool and I can't wait to have a change to create some items for the writers' group I belong to. You can send them images, they tell you how much it will cost you per item, and then you set the selling price, making the difference for yourself.

6. Donations. I never thought to ask for donations. Okay, so no one's donated yet, but they might!

7. Wil Wheaton has a blog! I almost didn't go look because he sounds rather like a jerk in the interview in the book, but when I did look, it turns out to be a funny, interesting and very left wing politically blog! I was impressed and glad I visited. The interview must have been done tongue-in-cheek but it didn't come to me that way when I first read it.

There's still much more to the book, but it's time to take a break and return from cyberspace to the real world for a while.