I’ve finished Scott Rosenberg’s history of blogging, Say Everything, and wanted to finish writing up my thoughts. The other day I wrote about the first half, now I’m adding my impression on the whole thing.
As I mentioned in the earlier post, Scott does a truly outstanding job of capturing the essence of events as they occurred. The toughest job for a historian or journalist is making the events recognizable to those who observed them closely, and Scott succeeds admirably on that front.
There are also pieces of analysis in the book that really impressed me. There’s a discussion of sincerity and authenticity that I found illuminating. I never really considered the differences between the two, but they are important and meaningful. I’d classify this blog as a “sincere” blog, but not an “authentic” one, by Scott’s definition.
He draws a distinction between “professional” bloggers and “traditional” bloggers that never occurred to me but that defines things perfectly — the pros write about what they think will interest their audience. The traditionalists write about what interests them. The difference is profound. I read all sorts of amateur blogs but very few professional ones. And what’s interesting to me is that the line is not whether the author gets paid or not — it’s the sensibility they bring to their work.
I also want to note that Scott incorporates quotations from blogs throughout the book, and the quotes are very well selected. The quotations not only underscore the points he’s trying to make, but are also almost always important in their own right. There are very few quotations from blogs in the book that were new to me.
This is a book about blogs that any blogger would enjoy reading. It’d also be great for people who have never gotten what blogging is all about. It’s really a fine book.
I’ve plowed into Scott Rosenberg‘s new history of blogging, Say Everything and finished the first half of the book today. It’s pretty clear to me that this book will be seen one day as incredibly important. This is the first history book I’ve ever read (and could very well be the last) that describes events that I observed very closely. Scott does a great job of filling in the backstories for those events. Nothing in the book rings patently false or wrong to me, and that’s the highest compliment I can pay.
A few random impressions from the first few chapters:
A few things I was sad to see go unmentioned:
I was reading Douglas Crockford’s excellent JavaScript: The Good Parts and came across a great sentence that you wouldn’t find in many technical books:
If you want to learn more about the bad parts and how to use them badly, consult any other JavaScript book.
That’s the sort of thing that cuts through the tedium of reading a book about programming.
In an answer to a reader question on how to choose popular non-fiction books to read, Tyler Cowen says:
The first open up a whole new world to you where previously none had existed. Many people felt this way when they read Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene for the first time. For obvious reasons, books like this are increasingly hard to find as you continue your reading career.
It would be fun to make a list of such books. The interesting thing is that in many cases books in this category can provide you with an important new way of seeing things even if you wind up rejecting a lot of what’s in them. Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent fell into this category for me. I’m going to think about making a longer list.
I’m looking for a first selection for a book club for programmers. The two books I’m considering to start are Code Compete, the classic Steven McConnell book on software development, and The Pragmatic Programmer, by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas.
Anyone have an opinion on which to choose? I’m looking for something that both experienced and relatively new programmers will enjoy and benefit from, and that isn’t language specific. Are there other books I should consider as well?
Tyler Cowen gives a very strong recommendation to Bottomfeeder by Taras Grescoe. The topic is ethically eating seafood in a world where the seafood supply is dwindling rapidly. I’m going to buy it tonight.
I’ve seen many mentions of the fact that there were over a million downloads of Suze Orman’s new book Women & Money while it was available free of charge at oprah.com. What I haven’t seen is how that affected sales of the book. Wired editor Chris Anderson has posted a graph showing that since it was available from Oprah’s Web site, it has topped the charts at Amazon.com. Some of that is attributable to the fact that Orman had just gotten the exposure of being featured on Oprah, but the free download certainly didn’t hurt her sales.
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