Say Everything - Refreshingly Well-done

Technology Thursday

Another book about blogging has been released. But this is a good one.  Scott Rosenberg, who co-founded Salon.com way back in the day (speaking in Internet time) wrote Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters.  I've found most attempts at explaining weblogs or chronicling the history of weblogs to be ... weak, if not ridiculously inaccurate.  I lived through and participated in some of the early, although not the earliest, weblogging activity. My own blog started in '99. My husband started his in '97.  Even before that, I'd been reading online journalers (mostly women, by the way), for years. 

I remember drawing an exponential curve on the whiteboard in my office in graduate school and predicting that weblogs would take off enormously. (I claim no particular genius about that - anyone plugged in to the internet and technology and online culture at the time might have said the same.)

I've seen a lot of people try to write about blogging, and I've seen a lot of people get it wrong. I can recommend Rebecca Blood's book The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog, and now, even having only read a few portions, I can recommend Rosenberg's. A couple of chapters of Say Everything are available online, and after reading the one about journalists versus webloggers, I tweeted that I thought i needed a cigarette.  (Only a few things have depressed me more in the last decade and a half than what has become of journalism.) Rosenberg completely nails so many of the issues, so many of the things that are just plain broken about the fourth estate today in the United States. It was truly refreshing.

He's created a website for the book, all of the endnotes are online and clickable, and he's planning a Wiki to include information that he ended up not including.  I'm very glad to see that someone took the time to be thoughtful and get at least a book's worth of the history of blogging's early days right. Five stars and two thumbs up.

Comments

[Katherine]

Lyn, thank you for pointing out that chapter on journalists vs bloggers. It's brilliant in nailing journalists' obssession with Romanesko as the harbinger of blogging's success.