Directory Blog

Techvibes.com
$0.99
Techvibes is a hyper-local technology blog, events calendar, job board, and company directory across a growing network of 13 cities - Vancouver, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal, Ottawa, Kitchener-Waterloo, Victoria in Canada and Seattle, Portland, Denver-Boulder, and South Florida in the United States. Our unique mix of content and functionality has helped grow the Techvibes global community to over 50,000 members over the past six years.Kindle blogs are fully downloaded onto your Kindle so you can read them even when you're not wirelessly connected. And unlike RSS readers which often only provide headlines, blogs on Kindle give you full text content and images, and are updated wirelessly throughout the day.

Blogosphere: Best of Blogs
$14.95
Product Rating: 4.0

Pros: "Provides comprehensive links to a decent cross-section of blogs I had yet to discover..."

Cons: "Parenting blogs? Not interested. `Geek chic' topics like science, and technology would've been more appealing?"

The Bottom Line: Somehow Buzzflash.com became Bussflash.com in the index! Not enough thumbnail screenshots either.

Best of Blogs is a guide to blogging penned by Adrienne Crew and Peter Kuhns; Adrienne is a licensing professional and is the co-editor of LAist.com (a group blog from Los Angeles), while Peter is a published computer book author and publishing consultant. Their observations are well-matched, and both praise the valuable input received from friends while compiling this book.

Everyone should enjoy this quirky guide. The book is divided into three unequal sections (30 pages, 226 pages, 64 pages). Part 1 is succinctly on-target; Crew defines blogs, Kuhns offers a history of the format, and together both explain how blogs are rearranging mainstream media. They also teach you how to find blogs on the internet with specialized search engines.

Search engines devoted to blogging that Crew and Kuhns mention are: Bloglines, Blogpulse, Feedster, PubSub and Technorati. One other tool for finding blogs (that's not mentioned in Part I) is Ice Rocket, recently unveiled by Dallas Maverick's owner Mark Cuban. Mark had the good fortune to unload Broadcast.com for a billion dollars before the tech bubble burst in the nineties.

The blogosphere -- as explained by Crew and Kuhns -- is an example of Grass Roots Communication. Due to the "freedom" and "freeness" of blogs, the medium is a great social leveler. Anybody with access to a computer can use a blog to organize a movement, or communicate with an international readership, for little or even no cost at all.

Of course, Part II excels at delivering a vast set of blog listings that fall into very specific niches of male/female interest. Running 5 recommendations per page (on average), Crew and Kuhns delve into a wide latitude of blogs that cover fields as disparate as Blogs of Seven Continents, Current Events, Entertainment, Environment, Hobby, Parenting, Politics, and Pushing Blog Boundaries.

For the many suggestions, let me thank you Adrienne and Peter. I've been an internet user since 1990 and although I've browsed a majority of sites that you've endorsed, I haven't heard of a quarter of these. Nevertheless, I think you miscalculated by concentrating on Parenting & Sports for 46 pages, when focusing on Science & Technology blogs would've sufficed.

Believe me, I admire Baseball Crank and Braves Journal, and I'm positive that all US men have ogled that Anna Kournikova website multiple times, but did you really have to stoop so low as to recommend blogs about Cricket, Indy Racing and Soccer? Well -- I guess there's an upside -- at least you didn't shill for punk Golf sites!

Let's be honest. There aren't any women picking up Best of Blogs for "parenting tips," or cooing about "baby blogs." Are there? I know women absolutely love that hearts and flowers cruft, but does it belong in your blogging book? Perhaps you should examine what really happens on the blog boards (corporate and government censorship, rampant flaming) and proffer a simple scorecard for handling such issues?

On the off chance I'm wrong about Parenting & Sports being improper hooks for the Best of Blogs demographic, I apologize. But generally speaking, I think anybody that picks up this book is looking for something far geekier. They're probably looking for blogs about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Concept Cars, Dinosaurs, Electron Microscopes, Journalism, Mars, Ribosomes, Robots, Singapore or UAVs.

Good as Best of Blogs is, I think the Kuhns Crew could've pumped up Part III with more gusto. That mediocre section delves into how to build a blog, and it covers boring topics like how to attract readers, create a blogroll, design your pages, manage your comments, name your blog and snoop on your readers using sixteen helpful tools.

Summing up, I think Adrienne and Peter did a respectable job with what they were trying to accomplish in Best of Blogs. The reason I picked this book up was because I got tired of surfing the same websites; I did manage to find several new favorites, and other items I'll be try out next time I'm on the computer.


The Book:
Best of Blogs,
Que

ISBN:
0-7897-3526-1

Pages:
320 Pages

Rating:
4 Stars

Visit the Official Websites:
www.blogsbestof.com
www.quepublishing.com
www.pearsoned.com

Keywords:
Austinist, Biz Stone, Chicagoist, Dooce, EFF, Feedster, Gizmodo, Hurricane Katrina, Intermediate, Jalopnik, Kotaku, Lifehacker, MySpace, New York Social Diary, Onion Routers, PubSub, RSS, Search Engines, Typepad, URL Fan, Valleywag, Weblogs, Xanga, Yahoo!

The Bookaholics' Guide to Book Blogs: the new literary force
$17.95
First Line: To my way of thinking, the best book bloggers are individuals who have no grist or motive other than a love of books and a desire to share their finds with others.

It should be obvious why I bought this book: I'm a blogger, and I blog about books. I wanted to see what these two publishers had to say about a subject I hold close to my heart.

The Bookaholics' Guide to Book Blogs is divided into chapters according to the various types of blogs: Booksellers' Blogs, Publishers' Blogs, Fan Blogs, Writers' Blogs, etc. As I read, I found several blogs that are familiar to me, but I also found many more to check out. Gillieron and Killgarriff both believe that book bloggers have a very important function in the world of book publishing today:

"I would like to see the voices of the book bloggers heard even louder. I think there is a major problem, despite the pages of feverish comment on literary prizes, radio shows, interviews and profiles, in that the media manages to talk about books in a way that goes over the heads of the vast majority of people. The book bloggers have developed loyal audiences, and I compare them most closely to newspaper columnists who may be your favourite to read each week in the Sunday paper. You get to know a personality and a style, and you find nuggets of new information each week, which makes you go back the following week for more. The book bloggers have another twist which makes them more loveable-- they write their thoughts for free."



There are dozens of nuggets of information in this small book, and best of all, a list of all the book blogs' URLs in the back to make it easier for you to find them. I found this book very easy to read (despite several typos!), and a very informative look into the future of book publishing and selling from the viewpoints of two UK publishers.

Google Hacks: Tips & Tools for Finding and Using the World's Information
$24.99
Nutshell review - If you want to know the ins and outs of using Google and all the advanced switches, tips, and tricks then this is your book. Good resource to own.