If you already have a blog of your own and have been posting to it for more than a month, or if you have been reading blogs for a while, then you have no need for this book. I’m not even sure that this book is necessary to understand weblogs or the weblog community if you are anything but a novice to the Internet. But I shouldn’t underestimate cluelessness, so if you feel in need of Blogs for Dummies, this is that mistitled book.

That might seem harsh from a guy who only started his own blog a month ago, and I truly mean no disservice to Rebecca Blood, whose earnestness is apparent in every personal anecdote. But there’s no denying that this is a short, simple book–perhaps because a blog, in its basic form (a regularly updated web page where new information is arranged in reverse chronological order), is a very simple thing. The beauty of the form is in the voices of its authors, and, as Blood states herein, that often grows organically as the blog author constantly writes.

I read this book not so much for myself (although I had hoped to pick up something of use for my personal site) but as a possible book to hand to co-workers to help explain what blogs are and how we were experimenting with them as a business knowledge management tool. It fails for that purpose, too, unfortunately, as the concentration is on individuals doing it for themselves.

[Finished 14 August 2002]