Product Description

The editors of The Huffington Post -- the most linked-to blog on the web -- offer an A-Z guide to all things blog, with information for everyone from the tech-challenged newbie looking to get a handle on this new way of communicating to the experienced blogger looking to break through the clutter of the Internet. With an introduction by Arianna Huffington, the site's cofounder and editor in chief, this book is everything you want to know about blogging, but didn't know who to ask.As entertaining as it is informative, The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging will show you what to do to get your blog started. You'll find tools to help you build your blog, strategies to create your community, tips on finding your voice, and entertaining anecdotes from HuffPost bloggers that will make you wonder what took you so long to blog in the first place.The Guide also includes choice selections from HuffPost's wide-ranging mix of top-notch bloggers. Among those who have blogged on HuffPost are Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Larry David, Jane Smiley, Bill Maher, Nora Ephron, Jon Robin Baitz, Steve Martin, Lawrence O'Donnell, Ari Emanuel, Mia Farrow, Al Franken, Gary Hart, Barbara Ehrenreich, Edward Kennedy, Harry Shearer, Nancy Pelosi, Adam McKay, John Ridley, and Alec Baldwin.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38935 in Books
• Published on: 2008-12-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Amazon.com Review
Book Description
The editors of The Huffington Post--the most linked-to blog on the web--offer an A-Z guide to all things blog, with information for everyone from the tech-challenged newbie looking to get a handle on this new way of communicating to the experienced blogger looking to break through the clutter of the Internet. With an introduction by Arianna Huffington, the site's cofounder and editor in chief, this book is everything you want to know about blogging, but didn't know who to ask.

As entertaining as it is informative, The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging will show you what to do to get your blog started. You'll find tools to help you build your blog, strategies to create your community, tips on finding your voice, and entertaining anecdotes from HuffPost bloggers that will make you wonder what took you so long to blog in the first place.

The Guide also includes choice selections from HuffPost's wide-ranging mix of top-notch bloggers. Among those who have blogged on HuffPost are Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Larry David, Jane Smiley, Bill Maher, Nora Ephron, Jon Robin Baitz, Steve Martin, Lawrence O'Donnell, Ari Emanuel, Mia Farrow, Al Franken, Gary Hart, Barbara Ehrenreich, Edward Kennedy, Harry Shearer, Nancy Pelosi, Adam McKay, John Ridley, and Alec Baldwin.

A Message from Arianna Huffington

Dear Amazon customer,

I'm thrilled to be working with Amazon.com as an online bookseller and partner for the publication of our new book, The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging. Amazon understands how to use the Internet to harness intelligence that enables people to make informed decisions. That mission is similar to that of The Huffington Post, a news and opinion site I co-founded in May 2005, and which has grown to become the most linked-to blog in the world. Bringing people together and sparking interesting conversations among my friends is ingrained in my DNA, and the world of blogging has opened up this passion to endless possibilities. It's fast-paced, limitless, and best of all, there's room for everyone. That's why I'm so excited about our Complete Guide to Blogging--if you have ever tried to start your own blog, wondered if you could, or if you're just an insatiable blog-addict, this book is for you. Our team of editors and contributors has put together all the tools you'll need to build your blog, strategies to create your community, ideas for finding your blogger voice, and countless, hilarious anecdotes and stories.

What are you waiting for? Start blogging!

Best,
Arianna

Questions for Arianna Huffington

Amazon.com: There are over 100 million blogs in the world, and counting. Does the world need another one? Is it too late to start one that will have any sort of impact?

Huffington: There is always room for another blog – the key is having something to say, and the ability to say it in an interesting way. That combination will allow you to break through in almost any medium, but especially in blogging. New bloggers are rising to the top all the time.

Amazon.com: When you meet someone and tell them, "You should blog!" (which it's my understanding happens quite often), what is it about them that makes you think they'd be a good blogger, especially in the long term? Are there some writers you wouldn't say that to?

Huffington: I invite people who have an interesting point of view, a provocative way of looking at the world. And the best bloggers tend to be a little obsessed about something. When I see those things, I get excited about offering a platform to express them. One of the original reasons for starting HuffPost was my feeling that some of the most interesting voices in our culture weren't online--and I wanted to make it easier for them to make the transition.

Amazon.com: Has the Huffington Post turned out the way you planned? What surprises did you adapt to take advantage of?

Huffington: We had our hopes, but no one could have predicted that HuffPost would become such a huge success. One of the things that surprised us was the passion expressed by our community, so we worked hard to provide them an easy way to comment, and an environment where civil discourse is encouraged.

Amazon.com: As many people have noted, the Obama campaign was the first to really harness the power of the web for fundraising and organizing. Do you think running in the first heavily blogged election also made his victory more possible?

Huffington: Obama's online operation was state of the art--incorporating everything from viral videos to texting-as-a-grassroots-organzing-tool to social networking sites to its online fundraising juggernaut--and was a key component in his success. It wouldn't be overstating things to say that if it wasn't for the web, we'd be inaugurating a different 44th president on January 20th. And thanks to blogging--and YouTube, instant fact-checks, and viral emails--it was much harder for his opponents to use the tactics of the past: fear, smear, and anything goes.

Amazon.com: You and your editors have written a book about blogging (while noting the irony of doing so). There's a lot of talk about the relationship between blogs and newspapers, but less so about how blogs will live with books. Aside from the obvious examples of bloggers getting book deals, how do you think blogs and books will affect each other?

Huffington: Anything that keeps people reading is a good thing! And blogging has certainly led to a renaissance of sorts for the written word. We live in a culture dominated by visual imagery and communication, so having so much vital writing on the web has helped re-habituate the younger generation to reading ... and hopefully blogs will be a gateway drug that leads them on to the harder stuff of books. And people blogging about books is obviously a great way to promote the best of the new releases (and some deserving older releases that never got the attention they warranted).

Review
"...capture(s) all of the excitement of the blogosphere, enabling the would-be blogger to take a confident step online....A must read for blog newbies."-- Andrea Sachs, Time Magazine

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER 1

Welcome to the World of Blogs

Blogging is the only addiction that won't make you fat, drunk or stoned. But it might make you so hungry for instant gratification that your books get shorter.
-- Erica Jong, novelist, HuffPost blogger

Yes, yes, we get the irony. We're writing a book about blogs. Where is the comments section? Where are the links? By the time you're thumbing through this at the bookstore several months will have transpired since we wrote these words. With no comments from readers. Or updates.

But believe it or not, a book about blogging fits neatly into this juncture in communication history. You see, printed books themselves were once a rather revolutionary idea. Six hundred years ago, if people wanted to share ideas, they had few options. We could shout our complaints from the barn rafters. Maybe a few chickens would hear us. We could scrawl or draw our musings and post them in the town square -- but soon the elements would take their toll. Documents were preserved, of course -- medieval monks specialized in hand-copying important texts -- but to justify years of a monk's time, these documents had to be privileged indeed. Few normal people could spare five years to hand-write their stories.

Then, in mid-fifteenth-century Germany, printer Johannes Gutenberg happened upon a discovery: By creating type pieces out of metal -- known as movable type -- and arranging them to form words, you could make multiple copies of a document far faster than a monk could write. Gutenberg's most famous creation was the Gutenberg Bible, but before long, people were using movable type to print science books, political commentaries, and other works that fundamentally changed the world.

Fast-forward to 2001. Somewhere in California, a twenty-something woman named Mena Trott, laid off from her dot-com job, started keeping an online diary of her life. She called it Dollar Short (as in a day late and a...). She wasn't happy with the available online publishing tools. So she and her husband, Ben, decided to create their own. On October 8, 2001, they released their contribution to the nascent blogging software industry. You could download it free of charge (though donations to the Trott rent fund were certainly welcome). With a wink at the past, they called the software Movable Type.

So there you have the blog/book connection: from movable type, to books, to books on Movable Type. Is blogging as big a revolution as what Gutenberg started? Only time will tell. But since we at The Huffington Post like to report on news and history in the making, we'd like to help you, dear reader, get started on making some history of your own.

What Is a Blog?

A blog at its most fundamental level is simply a "web log." That is, a regularly updated account of events or ideas posted on the web.

But calling blogs mere updated web diaries is a bit like calling poetry a pleasant arrangement of words on a page. There is an art to this. Those of us who work at HuffPost believe we are fortunate enough to be present at the advent of a new form of human communication -- one that is more interactive, more democratic, and just more fun than what has come before.

Blogs can bring down a Senate majority leader. They can show what a presidential candidate talks about in unguarded moments. They can provide stay-at-home parents with a little space to rant about the tragedy of colic (or maybe share updates on a local environmental issue -- and Brad Pitt -- during naps). They cut out the gatekeepers of information and shorten the news cycle. They give companies new ways to communicate with customers and shareholders -- and give customers and shareholders new ways to make their voices heard. Blogging gives you a feeling of satisfaction that writing a letter to the editor, or a letter to the "customer care" department of a corporation, cannot match. The public nature of blogs means that any of the billion people on this planet who own or have access to a computer can read what any of the rest of us is saying. That's true even if what we're saying is about a niche (for instance, issues germane to the mini off-road buggy community) that in the past would have gotten us labeled as freaks. In fact, because the potential audience is so huge, there is space for just about every topic you can imagine. As we link to each other, the marketplace of ideas sorts out who is worth listening to and who is not. A congressman's statement on an issue does not necessarily take precedence over a constituent's, the way it often does in a traditional news story.

It is this mix of the high and low, the personal and the political, that makes blogs so fascinating and so important in an open society. When we launched HuffPost in 2005, we knew we liked blogs, but even we underestimated how head over heels we'd fall. "Blogging is definitely the most interesting thing I've done as a writer, and I've been writing full-time since the late seventies," Carol Felsenthal, author of Clinton in Exile: A President Out of the White House and a HuffPost blogger, tells us. "I used to walk my dog, Henry, first thing in the morning. Now I'm often at my computer writing a post while Henry looks at me and wonders what happened to the good old days when his owner was compulsive but not hyper-compulsive."

It's the informality and the immediacy that make blogging addictive for many of us. No editor stands between us and the public. This leads to a lot of rumors and other fluff going up on the web. But it's also enormously liberating. You can put all kinds of ideas out there. "My thoughts don't all have to be fully baked," says Marci Alboher, who writes the "Shifting Careers" column and blog for The New York Times. She posts an idea and sees what her readers think. "They help me solve the problem and let me know if I'm going down the right path. It helps me figure out what the issues are very quickly."

It is this multidirectional conversation -- giving all of us a platform, expanding the scope of news, and making it a shared enterprise between producers and consumers -- that makes blogs so revolutionary. We have a lot of fun blogging. We're writing this book because we're pretty sure you will too.

The History of Blogs

For all that blogging is changing society, it's important to remember just how new it is. Remember Elián González, the Cuban boy that the entire country was obsessed with in the spring of 2000? His story had the markings of a blogosphere sensation: memorable photos, passionate opinions on U.S./Cuban policy, a political hot potato for the Clinton administration. But it was only a mainstream media mainstay because the blogosphere as we know it today had not yet evolved. The linking, commenting, and annotating we find commonplace today was still to come.

The term "weblog" was coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger, the editor of Robot Wisdom (itself a blog, albeit one with some nasty anti-Semitism bopping around on it, so we don't recommend you humor him by visiting the site). The shortened word "blog" was coined by Adaptive Path founder and former Epinions.com creative director Peter Merholz on his website (peterme.com) in 1999.

The number of blogs was small at first. According to Technorati (a company that conducts a sort of blogging census), the one millionth blog came online in the fall of 2003. At that time, people were creating blogs at a rate of about five thousand to six thousand per day. But the rate soon picked up. The blog total hit four million in the fall of 2004, around the time that blogs really exploded on the national radar screen for their role in the flap about memos related to President Bush's National Guard service. By that time, twelve thousand new blogs were coming online each day. Like a colony of bacteria, the blogosphere continued to post a quick doubling rate through 2005 (fourteen million blogs in August) and 2006 (fifty-seven million blogs in October). These days, Technorati is tracking 112 million blogs. Web users create approximately fifty thousand new blogs a day. This being the web, about three to seven thousand of these new blogs are nothing but spam, spam, and links to more spam. The rate of doubling has slowed as the blogosphere has matured. But new voices are still coming online in droves.

The demographics of the blogosphere could be the subject of several blog posts in their own right. For instance, in late 2006, the most common language for blogs was actually not English.

According to Technorati, it was Japanese (37 percent). English (at the time) was a close second at 36 percent. About 8 percent of blog posts are in Chinese and 1 percent is written in Farsi (the language spoken in Iran and some of the former Soviet republics). According to a 2006 survey from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, more than half of American bloggers (54 percent) are under age thirty. Both men and women blog at equal rates, but bloggers are less likely to be white (60 percent) than other Internet users (74 percent) and more likely to be Hispanic (19 percent vs. 11 percent).

The majority of the 112 million blogs out there will never grab more than a few readers. That's OK; 37 percent of bloggers told the Pew survey that keeping in touch with friends and family was a major reason for blogging, and 52 percent said they blogged mostly for themselves rather than for an audience. On the other hand, the most popular blogs -- Boing Boing, Engadget, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, and HuffPost -- get millions of unique visitors every month.

Anytime you get lots of eyeballs in one place, there is money to be made. According to a 2008 report from the firm eMarketer, advertising spending on blogs reached $283 million in 2007. The company projected this would rise to $746 million in 2012. For comparison, companies, politicians, and others spend over $70 billion on TV advertising each year and $40 billion on newspaper advertising. We don't think these industries are going to disappear. Nonetheless, as mediums converge, and as online properties ...

Customer Reviews

Comprehensive guide to blogging
As someone who has long been a blog reader and commenter and more recently, blogging on a small scale, I was naturally very interested in this book and whether it would live up to its name as a "complete guide to blogging." While like most books it is not 100% perfect it does come close and gives some great information. It is a great mix of practical advice as well as commentary from Huffington Post bloggers and other bloggers from around the web.

The book starts by giving the history of blogging and then in Chapter 2 goes into the basics of getting started. This chapter reads like a FAQ section giving the reader advice on everything from figuring out what to write about to mentioning the variety of software available to blogging to the issue of copyright.

Chapter 3 is all about getting your blog noticed which will be especially appreciated by those who have already started blogging but who may want more traffic. The tips are very practical and from my own experiences actually work. It also gives tips on monetizing your blog but is realistic about the fact that a blog isn't an instant ticket to riches.
Chapter 4, my personal favorite, is about finding your voice. Given how many blogs are already out on the internet I think for many new bloggers this chapter is helpful as it asks you to consider both what you will feel most passionate about and what you think your potential reader would want out of your blog.

Chapter 5 takes the notion of getting your blog noticed one step further by talking about how you can foster a community through your blog.

Chapter 6 is the history (albeit a brief one) of the Huffington Post and Chapter 7 talks about the impact of the blogosphere on mainstream media. These were honestly my two least favorite chapters as they were less practical in nature and particularly in the case of chapter 7, I have seem similar content covered in other books. (I work in communications so the impact of bloggers on mainstream media is something that is constantly up for discussion.) However, I imagine that if I were a bigger Huffington Post fan I probably would have enjoyed chearing more about the history. I imagine the same would be true for Chapter 7 if I had not already read so much about this.

The last section of the book features the blog roll, more blogging terms, website resource list, and also a 'best of' Huffington Blog posts.
Overall I think this was a pretty solid book and provided a good balance of giving tips, providing blogger commentary, and giving a lay of the land. I think the blogger quotes were especially interesting because it was intriguing to see their takes on things. I also loved when the book contrasted how a mainstream newspaper covered a particular even with how they thought a blogger would cover it. It did a good job of highlighting the difference in tone.

The only thing that I disliked about the book at times was the heavy use of sidebars. On one hand, I liked it because this content was interesting and calling it out as a sidebar made it easy to reference. At other times I found it distracted me from the main text because the side bars sometimes took up the majority of a page. I often had to flip back and reread content to remind myself of where I was which broke the my flow. In my opinion, this is only a minor complaint. I also think the book had a lot of perspectives of writers/actors/reporters turned bloggers and could have benefited from having more tips from more 'citizens turned bloggers' as they say. This isn't to say they don't have any, because they do, but given that I think many of those who read this book will fall into that camp I think having more can only be helpful.

Overall, I think this was a great book. I definitely walked away with ideas of how I could make my blog more successful and enjoyed reading some of the 'best of' content.

Looking for Blogging Inspiration?
The Huffington Post blogging book does not quite live up to the title of "Complete Guide To..." However, I highly recommend anyone thinking about starting a blog to read this book as it is very inspirational. That is the big plus to this book. Before finishing this book you will want to pick up the bat and step the plate knowing you are about to hit one out of the park. The book is filled with useful hints, and one of the most useful is the section on "Finding Your Voice." One will also find plenty of useful ethical advice.

As I was reading the book the question kept popping up - "Would I understand this if I were not a blogger or had not already moved through the problems of setting up a blog?" The Huffington authors do point potential blogger to sites where one can get up and running quickly. If one thinks they will be serious about blogging, then a book such as Lisa Sabin-Wilson's "WordPress for Dummies" is an excellent second book to read. Sabin-Wilson takes the reader through the nuts and bolts of setting up WordPress, one of the primary software tools for operating a blog. While specific to WordPress, the Sabin-Wilson book is the more complete guide.

The Huffington Post book lacks an index. This is a big mistake for many readers who, when reading a book touted as a "Complete Guide," will be looking for specific information on a particular topic. Instructional books should contain an index.

Twelve pages are devoted to Blogroll or links to other blog pages. Readers will find many interesting sites among this list. As expected, this book has a political and news slant, fully expected since the experiences come from Huffington Post bloggers. One can easily adapt their suggestions to a blog of your own choice with a little imagination.

This book was to be a Christmas gift, but I could not wait a few weeks to read it. I did not put it down, so there you have my positive recommendation. This is a wonderful little book that will inspire you to take your interest/passion to the next level - the Internet.

Lowell Herr
ITA Wealth Management

A good beginner book in spite of all the self-reference and name-dropping
I give this book three out of five stars, and while its good points have been covered by other reviewers, I'll air my three grievances. This book would be better if it were 2 inches smaller and about two-thirds the length, and if it was targeted more towards people who have something useful to say to a wider audience.

First, the book has extra large outside margins to accommodate occasional quotes, but a quick flip through the book shows that as just a lot of blank space padding out the book and giving it a more square shape that your average book. Seems like a waste of paper meant to make the book's uncommon shape stand out in physical book stores, and my little eco-gripe with the book.

While no one would deny that The Huffington Post is a successful and influential blog, and is therefor in a place to offer advice, the incessant talking about how great it is and the stories it broke, combined with a lot of "best of" selections is overkill. I suppose if one had never read or heard of blogs before, it would be useful to read so many examples of what gets written in blogs (anything!), but I would imagine most of the book's readers read blogs every day already. At least one-third of the book is about how the Huffington Post got started or excerpts from the site. Personally, I didn't find it all that relevant in a "how to blog" book. It's not as though a reader has no other way of finding out, if they wanted to, "What kind of things are on The Huffington Post?" The authors repeatedly entice potential bloggers with the fact that one of the great things about blogging is that there is no editor dictating a piece's length to you. It seems like this book could have used a cut-happy editor.

Lastly, there's a bunch of rally-the-troops, "Even YOU, a lil' stay-at-home mom, who wants to write about your boring and petty frustrations, CAN HAVE A BLOG!" stuff. Some of us, however, don't need to be sold on the concept of blogging. Some of us already have topics that interest us and experience writing about them. Some of us aim to reach wider audiences than sharing summaries of our daily lives on LiveJournal. I would have liked to see a chapter about fine-tuning one's messages and reaching target audiences for people who, pardon my snobbery, but actually have something of value to say to the world. I realize that most blogs are just tiny personal journals meant only to entertain the author and their friends, but I'd have liked to see a lot more from this book beyond the predominantly surface-level advice for people who are coming from a place of, "Golly, what could I write about? What are my interests? What are blogs?"

All in all, though, I do recommend the book for beginners, and cautiously recommend it for non-beginners. I wish it had less fluff and more intermediate-level advice. Many of the reviewers here praise the book for helping readers find their voice and a topic that interests them, and that's all good and well, but what about people who already had those two things covered long before picking up the book?