Customer Reviews

Never Threaten to Eat Your Co-Workers: Best of Blogs

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you're a blogger and enjoy the act of expressing your views and emotions online, you'll enjoy Never Threaten To Eat Your Co-Workers - Best Of Blogs (Apress). This collection of blog entries edited by Alan Graham and Bonnie Burton is a fun look at various blogs and bloggers that range from the well-known to the obscure. On one end you have a few blog entries by Wil Wheaton (Wesley Crusher of Star Trek: TNG fame). On the other end might be Ali Davis, the writer for True Porn Clerk Stories (she is a clerk in a video porn shop and writes about her experiences). The format is pretty simple... random samplings of some of their blog entries, along with short interviews asking about their motivation behind blogging and their views on the concept.

Some of the entries may have you laughing to tears ("Dear Cranky[...]") and some will make you think ("Clutching For Answers In Baghdad"), but all them will reflect the person behind the keyboard, no matter how quirky and real they may be. And in the interviews with the writers, you'll most likely see yourself, a fellow blogger who is sharing a small part of themselves with the world.

If you already read lots of blogs, this book may be redundant for you. I thought I knew what a blog was (some sort of Web journal logged in occasionally . . . almost like a personal diary), but had never read one. So I thought, well, why not read the best ones? That's what brought me to this book.

The authors searched thousands of blogs and submitted the better choices to a panel of three judges who rated each one. The highest rated blogs made it into the book, and the blog authors were interviewed. So the book provides you with both blogs and the reality behind the blogs.

The predominant style was to take ordinary events and slightly stretch and reform what happened to create humor. The method is much like that used by stand-up comics who like to poke fun at themselves. Much of the humor didn't work for me, but it certainly was offbeat. It seems like blogs operate in a less censored mode that much published writing. So you can learn a lot about the people who interact with the pornography at the video rental shops . . . if you really want to. If you dislike foul language and gross situations, this book may not appeal to you.

Lesser common styles involved taking you someplace where you thought you knew what goes on . . . but providing an insider's view of the reality instead . . . without exaggeration. The two best examples were of a public defender in California and a freelance reporter interviewing ordinary Iraqis during and immediately after the recent ouster of Saddam Hussein. I found the Iraq material to be riveting, and plan to follow this blog in the future.

I was impressed to see that published authors are doing blogs to provide writing practice, and to test out work on readers before "publishing" it in physical form. Of course, most bloggers are people who are unpublished and find this format appealing for its openness.

Fans of Wil Wheaton (Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation) will enjoy reading about his life as an ordinary guy "celebrity." His description of the restaurant meal is priceless.

I think that the time I spent with this book was well rewarded, and I now know a lot more about blogs and blogging than if I had randomly checked out blogging sites.

I encourage you to learn more, too, if this is a relatively new subject for you.

In the voluminous and often self absorbed blogosphere, where can or should you start reading? This is similar to the pre-Web Usenet newsgroups. In both, it is easy to encounter poorly written or hastily composed screeds. A total waste of your time. But here Graham and Burton come to our rescue. They offer editorial choice. A nice filter. We see well chosen essays that are actually literate and interesting. (More so than my scribblings here.) The essays are fairly traditional in representation. None of the New Wave experimental fad of the late 60s. Possibly because once you've read hypertext in a browser, the traditional printed page can seem limited.

Which is also ironic. That these essays are all out there on the Web, freely available for your perusal. Yet here they are in a book.

Of the essays, those by the woman working in a porno store are the funniest. The graphic descriptions she provides of the clientele are memorable.

I enjoyed reading this collection of "some of the best bloggers". Actually, I think it was just some of the best blog entries they could find. Which is not to say they aren't good because I'm saying here I totally enjoyed the reading. Just don't forget there's more out there. After you get this book, don't forget to go to your local internet and browse!