The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging (Book Excerpt)
The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging (Book Excerpt) - The editors of the Huffington Post and Arianna Huffington
Book price (Amazon.com)
What Is a Blog? A blog at its most fundamental level is simply a "web log." That is, a regularly updated account of events or ideas posted on the web.
But calling blogs mere updated web diaries is a bit like calling poetry a pleasant arrangement of words on a page. There is an art to this. Those of us who work at HuffPost believe we are fortunate enough to be present at the advent of a new form of human communication — one that is more interactive, more democratic, and just more fun than what has come before.
Blogs can bring down a Senate majority leader. They can show what a presidential candidate talks about in unguarded moments. They can provide stay-at-home parents with a little space to rant about the tragedy of colic (or maybe share updates on a local environmental issue — and Brad Pitt — during naps). They cut out the gatekeepers of information and shorten the news cycle. They give companies new ways to communicate with customers and shareholders — and give customers and shareholders new ways to make their voices heard. Blogging gives you a feeling of satisfaction that writing a letter to the editor, or a letter to the "customer care" department of a corporation, cannot match. The public nature of blogs means that any of the billion people on this planet who own or have access to a computer can read what any of the rest of us is saying. That's true even if what we're saying is about a niche (for instance, issues germane to the mini off-road buggy community) that in the past would have gotten us labeled as freaks. In fact, because the potential audience is so huge, there is space for just about every topic you can imagine.
It is this mix of the high and low, the personal and the political, that makes blogs so fascinating and so important in an open society. When we launched HuffPost in 2005, we knew we liked blogs, but even we underestimated how head over heels we'd fall. "Blogging is definitely the most interesting thing I've done as a writer, and I've been writing full-time since the late seventies," Carol Felsenthal, author of Clinton in Exile: A President Out of the White House and a HuffPost blogger, tells us. "I used to walk my dog, Henry, first thing in the morning. Now I'm often at my computer writing a post while Henry looks at me and wonders what happened to the good old days when his owner was compulsive but not hyper-compulsive."
It's the informality and the immediacy that make blogging addictive for many of us. No editor stands between us and the public. This leads to a lot of rumors and other fluff going up on the web. But it's also enormously liberating. You can put all kinds of ideas out there. "My thoughts don't all have to be fully baked," says Marci Alboher, who writes the "Shifting Careers" column and blog for The New York Times. She posts an idea and sees what her readers think. "They help me solve the problem and let me know if I'm going down the right path. It helps me figure out what the issues are very quickly."
It is this multidirectional conversation — giving all of us a platform, expanding the scope of news, and making it a shared enterprise between producers and consumers — that makes blogs so revolutionary. We have a lot of fun blogging. We're writing this book because we're pretty sure you will too.
