Customer Reviews

Dispatches from Blogistan: A travel guide for the modern blogger

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This is a shortened copy of a review that I wrote for TidBITS [....]

In today's world of profit-pumping book publishing, a blog-related title is easy - the technology is simple enough to explain without much research or tech-writing talent and the buzz factor should make the book easy to market. Suzanne, however, pleased and surprised me by taking the text far beyond a get-rich-quick effort seen in other blogging titles. She includes historical context and piles of advice, and dishes it out with an appealing writing style intermixed with interviews and quotes from Internet denizens such as Cory Doctorow and Laura Lemay.

My favorite part of the book is the section covering topics like why an RSS newsreader is cool, and what the deal is with tags, tag clouds, blog search engines, [...] trackback links, permalinks, Flickr, and other jargon that savvy Internet users fling around widely but rarely explain with any sort of satisfying depth. I read this section with avid interest, since I hadn't previously understood how it all fit together.

Suzanne's prose is personal and witty, and I expect to keep this book on my shelf as a reference for a few years and perhaps as a memento of an era after that.

What is it about blogging that inspires millions to commit their feelings to a public place? The author of Dispatches from Blogistan : A Travel Guide for the Modern Blogger is a technology journalist and media pioneer who here surveys the culture of blogs, reviews its tools and design features, and considers related issues of privacy, trust, and safeguards on the Net. While it's a cultural and social overview, it also provides novice bloggers with plenty of facts about the online self-publishing revolution - and the hot topic will prove popular not only for computer libraries, but for general-interest holdings and college collections interested in the culture of the Internet.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

Described in the subtitle as "a travel guide for the modern blogger," Suzanne Stefanac's book is worth reading whether you are a blogger or not. This is not so much a how-to book as it is a why-to-blog book.

The first two chapters offer a new take on the history of communications. And the book really begins with the introduction of the internet as radicalizing the way communications occur. Instead of pushing messages (from advertising to propaganda), the shift is to pull the audience to the message. Instead of one-to-many or one-to-one channels of communication, the shift is toward many-to-many channels. The blogosphere is the heart of the many-to-many messages.

Stefanac provides a layout of the landscape in her explanation of the blogosphere. Even though the book was published in 2006 and some things have changed, her insights into the culture still ring true. Technorati is no longer the only major search engine for blogs, for example. Google, Yahoo, Bing, and most others now include blogs in their search engine results. Such changes confirm how spot-on Stefanac is about the democratization of media. With a common sensical approach she addresses issues of trust, privacy, security, and legal safeguards. Yet its reading about the power of collaborative discourse -- many-to-many conversations -- that gets to the heart of blogging.

There are so many basics to blogging covered in this book I can highly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand this new social media phenomena. People all over the world upload more than a million new blog posts every day. Every day. News blogs are written by citizen journalists and professional reporters. Food blogs by farmers, grocery stores, chefs, home cooks, foodies, gardeners, upscale food magazines, food manufacturers, product advertisers, etc.

Blogs as diaries. Blogs as clubhouses. Blogs as news feeds. Blogs as soapboxes.

Stefanac takes the blogger on a road tour. She gives the reader driving instructions but most importantly takes them under the hood of the car to explain how the search engines work. And how to check our own fluids, tire pressure and lights. It's a handy desk reference for a seasoned blogger and a wonderful place to start for someone who is new to blogging.