Dispatches from Blogistan: A Travel Guide for the Modern Blogger

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

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.