Ring the Bell, School’s Back in Session

Tonight I’ll be starting my second run as the instructor of the blogging workshop at New York University’s Center for Publishing, and I’m looking forward to it—the Center and I compared notes after last year’s classes, and we hit upon a few tweaks that I think will make it an even better experience for the students. (For one thing, we’ve switched from two six-hour sessions to six two-hour sessions.) The first night is largely an introduction to the concept of blogging and some of the highlights of its short history, for which I’m really grateful that Scott Rosenberg wrote Say Everything, a book that explains “how blogging began, what it’s becoming, and why it matters.” As I mentioned last year, Rosenberg provided “a great resource for discussing the blogosphere’s roots and identifying the stand-out characteristics of the first great blogs,” and it’s a great springboard for talking about two of the key principles I’ll be sharing with students: identifying your niche subject and refining your personal voice.

Rosenberg does a great job of making technological topics accessible to non-techie readers, and his previous book, Dreaming in Code, was probably the best effort I’d read in that vein since stumbling onto the Stephen Levy classic Hackers as a teenager—an experience which made me decide that there must be something to this whole “computer” racket and pretty much set me on the path that’s led to this point.

6 October 2010 | events |