Read This: The Books Behind My Blogging Workshop

I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity earlier this month to teach a two-day workshop on blogging for NYU’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies, and there were several books that were especially helpful as I gathered my thoughts about what I was going to say to students during those two sessions. Scott Rosenberg’s recently published Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters was a great resource for discussing the blogosphere’s roots and identifying the stand-out characteristics of the first great blogs, while Bob Walsh’s Clear Blogging provided helpful ideas about effective writing techniques, as did Darren Rowse’s Problogger.

Reading Seth Godin has transformed the way I think about not just marketing but also self-presentation, and Purple Cow has been an especially meaningful book for me in that sense, but I’d also highly recommend his most recent book, Tribes. And it was Seth that led me to Hugh MacLeod, who just published his first book, Ignore Everybody: And 39 Other Keys to Creativity, which I rank right up there with Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art and Gail Sher’s One Continuous Mistake when it comes to inspiration for creative writers.

I also learned a lot about online writing from The Twitter Book, where Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein lay out some basic principles that, again, helped me get a better grasp on self-presentation and finding my online voice. There’s solid info in there whether you’re blogging for a business or just for yourself.

20 October 2009 | read this |