Blogging Books

Blogging about Blogging is happening with growing frequency on many weblogs, but writing in hard copy is also becoming more popular. Here are a few of the best selling and most popular books on the topic. (Descriptions are taken from Amazon) I’ve read most of the first two – both are worth a look. If you’ve read these or other books on blogging leave your reviews and suggestions in comments.

Blog On: Building Online Communities with Web Logs By Todd Stauffer.

Weblogs — or blogs — are taking the Internet by storm! Now you can expand your site using message boards, mailing lists, and numerous other features to maintain and promote community with help from this easy-to-understand guide. Includes practical tips for making tweaks and improvements with HTML, Flash, Web images, and much more.

Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content by Biz Stone.

Turn your home page into a microportal with fresh content that will keep readers coming back. The first hands-on book on building blogs, this is an excellent tutorial for new bloggers, and includes many advanced techniques for veteran bloggers…. This book features hands-on tutorials for building a blog, adding a user based commenting system, adding team members, syndicating with JavaScript, adding searches to a site, and much more. This is the book for creative web-enthusiasts looking for the “next thing” and it’s the first book of new ideas and advanced tutorials for bloggers already numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

We’ve Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture – By Rebecca Blood:

We’ve Got Blog is a collection of 34 essays that explore this rapidly growing trend. Contributors include such noted bloggers as Joe Clark, Cameron Barrett, and Giles Turnbull. The discussion covers the history and community of weblogs, contrasts weblogs and traditional journalism, and offers advice on starting a weblog.

We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs By Paul Bausch, Matthew Haughey and Meg Hourihan.

Your Complete Guide to Creating and Maintaining Weblogs. Weblogs offer an exciting new way to voice your opinions, share ideas with others, and help your business grow. Written by a team of weblog pioneers-the people who helped create Blogger and the MetaFilter community blog-this book shows you how to build, evolve and automate weblogs for personal and business use.

The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog by Rebecca Blood

Weblogs–frequently updated, independently produced, and curiously addictive–have become some of the most popular sites on the Web today. The Weblog Handbook is the first book to explain how weblogs work and explore their impact on the media landscape….With a clear and engaging voice, Rebecca explains how to choose among the available tools, even walking the beginner through the process of creating their first weblog. Along the way she answers commonly asked questions concerning weblog etiquette, how to attract readers, and the qualities that make a weblog stand out, alerting the novice to considerations–and pitfalls–they didn’t know to ask about.

There are others around also including:

– Essential Blogging
– Design for Community: The Art of Connecting Real People in Virtual Places
– Running Weblogs with Slash

Unleashing the Idea Virus By Seth Godin

Whilst not about blogging at all – ‘Unleashing the Idea Virus’ is a book that taught me a lot about the medium. I’m re-reading it again at present.

Counter to traditional marketing wisdom, which tries to count, measure, and manipulate the spread of information, Seth Godin argues that information can spread most effectively from customer to customer, rather than from business to customer. Godin calls this powerful customer-to-customer dialogue the ideavirus…. In Unleashing the Ideavirus, Godin examines how companies like Napster and Hotmail have successfuly launched ideaviruses. He offers a recipe for creating your own ideavirus, and shows how businesses can use ideavirus marketing to succeed in a world that doesn’t want to hear it anymore from traditional marketers. Seth blogs here.