Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters

I'm an occasional blogger, for fun not for profit. And I've followed a number of blogs for several years, leading to a few online friendships. I enjoyed this book immensely, especially the chapter titled "Journalists vs. Bloggers." It's the kind of book you can read sort of randomly.

It's a bit weird reading "Say Everything," Scott Rosenberg's book about the history of blogging. I've read lots of tech books, but this one involves many people I know, directly or indirectly, and an industry I've been part of since its relatively early days. I've corresponded with many of the book's characters, linked back and forth with them, even met a few in person from time to time. And I directly experienced and participated in many of the changes Rosenberg writes about. The history the book tells, mostly in the first couple of hundred pages, feels right. He doesn't try to find The First Blogger, but he outlines how the threads came together to create the first blogs, and where things went after that. Then Rosenberg turns to analysis and commentary, which is also good. I never found myself thinking, Hey, that's not right! or You forgot the most important part!--and according to Rosenberg, that was the feeling about mainstream reporting that got people like Dave Winer, a major instigator of the technology, blogging to begin with. Rosenberg's last book, "Dreaming in Code," came out only last year, in 2008, so much of what's in "Say Everything" is remarkably current. He covers why blogging is likely to survive newer phenomena like Facebook and Twitter. And he doesn't hold back in his scorn for the largely old-fashioned thinking of his former newspaper colleagues (he used to work at the San Francisco Examiner before helping found [...]). But then I hit page 317, where he writes: "...bloggers attend to philosophical discourse as well as pop-cultural ephemera; they document private traumas as well as public controversies. They have sought faith and spurned it, chronicled awful illnesses and mourned unimaginable losses." That caused a bit of a pang. After all, that's what I've been doing on my blog, writing about my cancer, for the past few years. It hit close to home. Next, page 357: "For some wide population of bloggers, there is ample reason to keep writing about a troubled marriage or a cancer diagnosis or a death in the family, regardless of how many ethical dilemmas must be traversed, or how trivial or amateurish their labours are judged." Okay, sure, there are lots of cancer bloggers out there. I'm just projecting my own experience onto Rosenberg's writing, right? Except, several hundred pages earlier, Rosenberg had written about an infamous blogger dustup between Jason Calacanis and Dave Winer at the Gnomedex 2007 conference in Seattle. The same conference where, via video link, I gave a presentation, about which Rosenberg wrote on his blog: "Derek K. Miller is a longtime Canadian blogger [who'd] been slated to give a talk at Gnomedex, but he's still recovering from an operation, so making the trip to Seattle wasn't in the cards. Instead, he spoke to the conference from his bed via a video link, and talked about what it's been like to tell the story of his cancer experience in public and in real time. Despite the usual video-confe

Scott's overview of the who, what, when, where and why of blogging is tremendous. It's a terrific read - not too insidery for people who didn't live through this, and pitch-perfect for those who did. He covers the controversies without picking sides, makes old stories relevant by showing their connection to today's trends, and manages to highlight many of the right personalities to tell the broader arc of blogging. This isn't a geek book - Scott appropriately stays away from endless acronyms, buzzwords and jargon, and instead rightly focuses on the stories that have helped make so many of us devotees of the medium. If you're wondering why there are so many blogs today, it's hard to imagine a better primer than Say Everything. More importantly, if you want to understand what that ubiquity means as we look ahead, give the book a read.

As a former journalist trained on the job at Forbes, who currently blogs about clean air issues and destinations, I recommend Scott Rosenberg's book, Say Everything. What stood out for me was Scott's explanation about why blogs are meaningful for niche audiences and how trusting the voice of a blogger is not much different than trusting the voice of a mainstream reporter. There's a lot of chatter in the world about how trustworthy a blogger may be. As a former reporter who at times felt chained to the opinions of a magazine and editor, (who in turn may have needed to consider advertisers when writing a story) I believe there's great freedom and honesty that comes with blogging. Like everything in life, we must discern who we will trust. I trust Scott Rosenberg has a good pulse on blogging.

Great book -- It reads like a novel, and contrary to most "business" books it is very well written. Writing present or quasi-present history is a difficult genre and any author will always be suspected of lacking the distance necessary to separate out the wheat from the chaff especially, especially in a world where everybody craves for celebrity status. Scott Rosenberg largely and skillfully avoids this pitfall. Over the last 25 years, digital technologies have empowered people a little bit more each time, but blogging has brought a new type empowerment, not simply the ability to do more things better and faster, but to say and share things differently. The three main sections of the book describe the progressive expansion of the art of blogging from pioneering individuals to the build-up of the massive blogosphere that has reshaped our connection to what's happening around us and to the news media altogether. The book is a gold mine of information -- and helps better understand the foundations of today's social media.