Read the Introduction

Weblog (blog)—A journaled web site composed of personal observations, often with excerpts from additional web sites. Blogs are sometimes associated with online journals or diaries, but are quickly evolving to encompass and suit the needs of their authors.

A year and a half ago...in the middle of a particularly steamy brainstorming session, somewhere between the Calvin Klein bar soap and the loofa, I was struck with an idea. I was reflecting on an excellent weblog (blog) entry and the remarkable evolution and emergence of the blog in our daily lives, I thought to myself that a lot of this content was as good as anything in print today. I had come to the realization that blogging was not only redefining journalism, but was quickly revolutionizing literature as well. I noticed that I was starting to read more online blog content and less content from magazines and other literary sources.

As a writer, my own blogging is an exercise in saying more with less, and the art of self-editing, a tool to help me be a better writer. But what I found remarkable is that thousands, if not millions, of bloggers aren’t professional writers. They push brooms, cook food, park cars, clean hotel rooms, etc. There was this entire writing community who never perceived of themselves as writers, they just had something to say.

Some of it was funny, some thought provoking, but regardless of the message, the one constant is that each blog gives us an in-depth view of another person, without the message being clouded by an editor. Millions of daily observations, thoughts, experiences, memories, rants, all condensed into these neatly packed moments across the World Wide Web.

As I toweled off I thought to myself, these people deserve to be published and discovered by others. And so began the journey that would later become this book series.

However...

I found that reading blogs, and more importantly, finding good content, was complicated and time consuming. I was looking for a few needles in an ever-expanding haystack. Together with my co-editor, Bonnie Burton, we spent months reading and collecting the best content we could find. We then struggled for months on how to best present the material. Nothing like this had ever been done before, so no guidelines existed.

Now, some purists will say that translating the blog into print defies everything the blog stands for. It loses some of its power and impact. It loses the dynamic link that makes it a living thing. But, I’d say to them that ideas are always living things, regardless of the medium, because they are linked between our minds. Great ideas transcend their medium and what we found were great ideas.

This book has no political agenda. The task was simply to find people who knew how to convey their thoughts in a way that might make you think, challenge your views, make you laugh or cry, and possibly inspire you to add your voice to theirs. We wanted to be the Consumer Reports of blogging.

So enjoy!

How to Use This Book
Other than the obvious act of reading, you might be interested in how to get the most out of this book.

In order to preserve the feel that what you are reading is literature, we’ve placed all the information about each blog (site name and URL) at the end of each entry. In addition, you’ll find an index in the back of the book so you can easily locate entries from a particular blogger.

Finally, since the only permanent thing you can count on is change, in the event that an author might remove or move their site to a new home on the web, we’ve assembled a web site to keep this information timely:

Never Threaten Website

Also on this web site, you’ll find links to a number of bloggers who unfortunately didn’t make the final cut of the book. Due to the inevitable issue of page count restrictions, we had to leave out some of our favorite bloggers. So if you enjoy the book and want to take a spin around what we also thought were remarkable entries, please visit the site. And just in case you feel inspired, we’ve also included a guide with information to help you too get started blogging.

Posted: Sat - March 20, 2004 at 11:32 AM | |