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 |

Read This: Mrs. Beatrice’s Favorite iPhone App

I was recently given the opportunity to test-drive the new McSweeney’s iPhone app, but since I’m still using a Treo for a while longer, I passed the invitation on to Mrs. Beatrice, who filed this report after experimenting with the app for a few days:

To begin, a confession: I have about six trillion iPhone apps. It’s actually slightly embarrassing, since I can’t find half of them at any given time (yeah, I know about the search function—that just seems like cheating, somehow), and a good portion of the other half are those games you’re obsessed with for about a day and then wonder why in the hell you spent the $0.99.

But I actually put the McSweeney’s app in a nice little corner that I can find easily, because it’s quickly become one of my favorites. You’ll find the same stuff you’ve learned to love in the print and Web versions of McSweeney’s—for example, “Ethical Dilemmas Involving Klondike Bars,” by Justin Hook, or “YouTube Comment or e.e. cummings?,” by Francois Vincent (an embarrassing note about the latter piece—I got every single one wrong). But now you’ll be able to read it on the subway or other weird places you can’t get the Internet. And it updates every day, or nearly, so there’s something new to read each day you go back to the app.

McSweeney’s fans should definitely buy this app. And all the people who aren’t McSweeney’s fans must not have read McSweeney’s yet, so of course, they should buy the app, too.

4 October 2009 | read this |