Book: Blog!

Blog!
by David Kline & Dan Burstein

ISBN-10: 1593151411

I had already been blogging for a year, when my mentor dropped this book in my lap. I already knew how blogging affected my life since I have been both reading and writing by then. I thought I knew all I needed to know about blogs so I never even opened that book. Recently though, I set my mind on it just so that I didn’t miss anything. And boy did I miss. I actually had no clue as to what a monster the blogging phenomenon had become. The book opened my eyes and made me realize what a revolution is happening in the media world.

Blog! is divided in 3 sections: politics, business, and culture. What I liked is mostly the business part since that is what I am interested, but it is definitely worth reading the whole book.

The book is a combination of author notes, essays, and interviews so it has a pretty wide perspective encompassing many different viewpoints. After all, the book shows you “how the newest media revolution is changing politics, business, and culture” and it does so very effectively through a multitude of opinions. The authors indeed did a great research and got in touch with a lot of bright people.

A few highlights:

• The main point for business is that blogging puts a face to a company, establishes trust, communication, allows for feedback on products. This seems to be best achieved by Christian Sarkar’s double-loop marketing, in which company first builds a blog with relevant, important, and useful information for customers and only after building community, they pitch products. Very smart strategy.
• If you fudge or lie on a blog, you are biting the karmic weenie,” Hayden told Fortune Magazine. “The negative reaction will be so great that, whatever your intention was, it will be overwhelmed and crushed like a bug. You’re fighting with very powerful forces because it’s real people’s opinions.”
  -Got to take that one in consideration!
• I laughed a lot at this one:
  …how an economist opens a can of soup – i.e. “First, assume a can opener.”
• “In fact, if you look at the way people get jobs in the New York media world, you see that a lot of it seems to be about who you know and how well you schmooze at parties. Weblogs are more meritocratic, in my opinion.”
  -What a beautiful word, “SCHMOOZE”. This is from the interview with Nick Denton. Very nice observation.
• “Risk takers by definition often fail,” the workplace philosopher Scott Adams once observed. “So too morons, and in practice it is hard to tell the difference.”
• Andreas Stavropoulis makes very good points on ways to make money:
  “The first way is to give people something valuable that they’re willing to pay for.” (software, business tools, subscriptions etc) “This second form, advertising, is the oldest way of making money on the Web, of course. And then there’s the third way of making money – by facilitating transactions online and then taking a piece or a cut of those transactions.” (think Ebay). All three he says are potential models for blogs and related sites, with advertisement being the most developed.
• David Kline makes a very good point when he says that blogs are great and powerful, but will definitely not destroy the Big Media, because, “tomorrow’s possibilities are always forged upon the anvil of today’s social and economic realities.”
• This last one by Wil Wheaton:
  “Creativity is the absence of fear. When you’re not afraid, you’re really free to be creative.”

Good book! When you read it, you will understand why blogs have to become part of your life, just like Google became years ago.