Blogging & Blogs Books - Page 3

Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers

Robert Scoble, Shel Israel

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 49 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

From the creator of the number one business blog comes a powerful exploration of how, and why, businesses had better be blogging: Naked Conversations.

According to experts Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, blogs offer businesses something that has long been lacking in their communication with customers -- meaningful dialogue. Devoid of corporate-speak and empty promises, business blogs can humanize communication, bringing companies and their constituencies together in a way that improves both image and bottom line.

The authors use more than 50 case histories to explain why blogging is an efficient and credible method of business communication. You'll find yourself excited about the possibilities blogs present after reading just a few pages. Discover how:

• Prominent business leaders, including Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks, Bob Lutz from General Motors, and Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Microsystems, are beginning to use blogs to connect with their customers in new ways.
• Blogging has changed the rules of communication and competition.
• You can launch an effective blogging strategy and the reasons why you should.

Featuring a foreword by Tom Peters, this is a resource you and your business can't do without.

Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq

Riverbend

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 31 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In August 2003, the world gained access to a remarkable new voice: a blog written by a 25-year-old Iraqi woman living in Baghdad, whose identity remained concealed for her own protection. Calling herself Riverbend, she offered searing eyewitness accounts of the everyday realities on the ground, punctuated by astute analysis on the politics behind these events.

In a voice in turn eloquent, angry, reflective and darkly comic, Riverbend recounts stories of life in an occupied city-of neighbors whose homes are raided by US troops, whose relatives disappear into prisons and whose children are kidnapped by money-hungry militias. At times, the tragic blends into the absurd, as she tells of her family jumping out of bed to wash clothes and send e-mails in the middle of the night when the electricity is briefly restored, or of their quest to bury an elderly aunt when the mosques are all overbooked for wakes and the cemeteries are all full. The only Iraqi blogger writing from a woman's perspective, she also describes a once-secular city where women are now afraid to leave their homes without head covering and a male escort.

Interspersed with these vivid snapshots from daily life are Riverbend's analyses of everything from the elusive workings of the Iraqi Governing Council to the torture in Abu Ghraib, from the coverage provided by American media and by Al-Jazeera to Bush's State of the Union speech. Here again, she focuses especially on the fate of women, whose rights and freedoms have fallen victim to rising fundamentalisms in a chaotic postwar society.

With thousands of loyal readers worldwide, the Riverbend blog is widely recognized around the world as a crucial source of information not available through the mainstream media. The book version of this blog will have "value-added" features: an introduction and timeline of events by veteran journalist James Ridgeway, excerpts from Riverbend's links and an epilogue by Riverbend herself.

Publish and Prosper: Blogging for Your Business

DL Byron, Steve Broback

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

While personal blogs take up much of the blogosphere, blogs are quickly gaining popularity in business as an inexpensive and amazingly effective marketing tool. It’s time for a practical book about business blogging: this is the first book to demonstrate how businesses are blogging and how you can use blogging technology to converse with your customers to build your brand and sell your products.

Written from the business person/designer’s perspectives, this book shows how businesses can leverage current, real-world blogging techniques, tools, and platforms to promote and enhance their ventures. The key idea is that the conversation with your market is stronger and more meaningful with a blog. Filled with practical information and a how-to approach, this book provides case studies of companies as large as Boeing or General Motors and as small as Clip-’n-seal. Readers will learn about the types of business blogs, how companies use blogs, how to sell blogs to management and IT, effective blog design, content, and conversation, pitfalls to avoid, how to develop Web presence, and more.

On Becoming Fearless...in Love, Work, and Life

Arianna Huffington

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Total reviews: 32 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A manifesto for women on how to overcome fear and achieve their dreams, from Arianna Huffington, a woman who embodies fearlessness--bestselling author, politician, mother, Web entrepreneur, and one of the most powerful women in America.

Women confront fear every day: fear for their children, fear of appearing foolish, of being assertive, of looking fat, of getting sick, of going broke, of losing love.

Enter Arianna Huffington, with timely and powerful advice on how to be bold. Arianna is fearless, but not by nature; she's had to learn and practice all her life. In ON BECOMING FEARLESS, she puts it all on the table, exploring fearlessness at work, in parenting, in love, in aging, and much more. It's never too early--or too late--for women to learn fearlessness, and ON BECOMING FEARLESS will strike a chord with every woman who wonders how she can make her mark on a world that still values "nice," "accommodating," and "team player" as feminine qualities.

The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right

Debbie Weil

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Packaged, filtered, controlled conversations are out. Open, two-way, authentic communications with your customers and employees are in. We’re entering a new age of corporate communications, and blogs are a key enabler of a better way of talking with customers, employees, the media, and other key constituencies.

In The Corporate Blogging Book Debbie Weil provides a clear-eyed look at blogging as a marketing communications strategy-what works, what doesn’t, and why creating and maintaining a good blog is worth the effort.

Weil demystifies corporate blogging by stripping away the technical jargon and showing you exactly what your customer needs from your blog. She urges managers and executives to confront their fear of blogging. She explains how to avoid legal pitfalls, who should be doing the blogging, and how to keep readers coming back.

Weil explains how corporations like Google, GM, and IBM are maintaining popular blogs and keeping their sales up. Whether your company is large or small, make your way into the blogosphere, and let Debbie Weil show you how to get it right the first time.

No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog

Margaret Mason

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 25 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Surprisingly helpful treatment of a trendy topic 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 6 people found this review helpful.

Margaret Mason's No One Cares What You Had for Lunch promises us 100 Ideas for Your Blog. This is the sort of trendy topic that tends to inspire writers to try to make a quick buck by whipping through and capitalizing on a subject's popularity without having to put in a lot of hard work. In this case, however, Ms. Mason has done a fantastic job of addressing the topic of blogging in a manner that will be of great benefit to her readers and is fun to read.

The suggestions in each chapter are divided primarily by the amount of time they're likely to take. Some suggestions involve individual posts. Some tackle your overall approach to your blog. Others deal with ongoing projects within your blogging, or your relationship to other blogs and bloggers. The entries are short and pithy, much like blog entries themselves, serving as great examples as well as instructions. Many of them further include real-world examples from various blogs (the author's and those belonging to other bloggers) that entertain and amuse while perfectly demonstrating Ms. Mason's points.

Ms. Mason has a great handle on the kind of posts that intrigue and interest people. Better than any particular individual suggestion, what I took away from this book is a general feel for the kinds of personal posts and details that readers find fascinating and why.

Editorial Review:

Tired of filling up your blog with boring posts? Take the next step and get inspired to create something unique. Author Margaret Mason shows you the way with this fun collection of inspirational ideas for your blog. Nobody Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog is a unique idea-book for bloggers seeking fun, creative inspiration. Margaret gives writers the prompts they need to describe, imagine, investigate and generate clever posts. Sample ideas include:

• Writing a serial novel
• Conducting unnecessary experiments
• Creating your autobiography
• Public eavesdropping
• And much, much more

Petite Anglaise

Catherine Sanderson

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Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A young Englishwoman in Paris, juggling a dying romance and the demands of motherhood, discovers escape, excitement, and—possibly—true love when she reinvents herself with a click of the mouse as … Petite Anglaise.


She has a job in Paris, the city of her dreams, a handsome Frenchman, a beautiful bilingual toddler, and a charming apartment with breathtaking views. So why does Catherine Sanderson feel that her life is coming apart? Stuck in a relationship quickly losing its heat, overwhelmed by the burdens of motherhood, and restless in a dead-end administrative job, Catherine reads an article about starting an online diary and on a slow day at work—voilà—Petite Anglaise is born. But what begins as a lighthearted diversion, a place to muse on the fish-out-of-water challenges of ex-pat life, soon gives way to a raw forum where Catherine shares intimate details about her relationship, discontents, and most impulsive desires—a daily soap opera starring herself, her lover (Mr. Frog), and their daughter (Tadpole).

When a faithful reader (who happens to be an attractive, charismatic Englishman) tries to get close to the girl behind the blog, the lines between Catherine’s real and virtual personas blur, tempting her to leave Mr. Frog and the life she has worked so hard to construct, in pursuit of l’amour fou. Propelled by her intoxicating alter ego and cheered on by thousands of readers, Catherine’s life spirals to exhilarating highs and dizzying lows as her life and her creation collide head-on and she must somehow make peace with both.

Fizzing with the vitality and allure of Paris itself, Petite Anglaise offers a fresh twist on the classic story of reinvention abroad: how a young woman transforms herself, wielding the power of a mouse.

Building Web Sites All-in-One For Dummies

Claudia Snell, Doug Sahlin

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 2.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Want to launch a Web site but don’t know where to begin? Information on Web design, page building software, using HTML, site planning, and everything else you need to know can be found easily in Building Web Sites All-in-One For Dummies, 2nd Edition. So you can easily find what you’re looking for, this plain-English guide is divided into nine minibooks:

• Preparations
• Site Design
• Site Construction
• Web Graphics
• Multimedia
• Audience Interaction
• E-Commerce
• Site Management
• Case Studies

From deciding what your site should do to working with HTML, using Dreamweaver, incorporating Flash creations, and keeping your site on the cutting edge, this book is your one-stop course in building Web sites. Learn to:

• Plan your site, decide whether you need a Web team, and create relevant content
• Develop your site design, work with wire frames, and organize behind-the-scenes files that make your site work
• Select the right hardware and software and create pages with Dreamweaver
• Create cool site graphics with Photoshop and Fireworks
• Add interest with Flash animations, slideshows, video, and sound
• Make your site interactive with Javascript, PHP, ASP, and MySQL
• Build an e-commerce site that’s user-friendly, legally sound, and secure
• Keep your content and design fresh and up to date

Ready to begin? Grab Building Web Sites All-in-One For Dummies, 2nd Edition and let’s get started!

The Washingtonienne

Jessica Cutler

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Total reviews: 95 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The blog that scandalized Washington, D.C., is not a sharp steamy, utterly unrepentant novel set against the backdrop of the nations’ capital….

"Just between us girls, Washington is an easy place to get laid. It’s a simple matter of economics: supply and demand. Washington lacks those industries that attract the Beautiful People, such as entertainment and fashion. Instead it has the government, also know as ‘Hollywood for the Ugly.’ Without the model-actress population to compete with, my stock shot up when I moved to DC."

When Jacqueline Turner’s fiancée gives her two days to move out of his apartment, she has no choice but to leave New York City and crash with her best friend in Washington, DC. (She can’t be expected to keep herself in cute clothes while paying New York City rent, after all.) She needs a new, exciting life—not to mention real employment. Where better to get a fresh start than the nation’s capital?

Alas, DC turns out to be a lot more buttoned-up and toned down than she’d hoped. It’s a town where a girl has to make her own excitement—and Jacqueline Turner is just the woman for the job.

From the married presidential appointee who gives her cash after each tryst, to the lascivious Georgetown lawyer who parades her around like something out of Pretty Woman, Jackie’s roster of paramours grows so complicated her friends ask her to start a blog so they can keep up. But in a small town like Washington, the line between private and public blurs very easily. Just as one of her beaux takes a lead in the race for her heart, Jackie realizes this blog idea may be more than she bargained for….

Deliciously gossipy and impossible to put down, The Washingtonienne is every bit as outrageously scandalous as the real-life exploits that inspired it.

In May, 2004, 26-year-old Jessica Cutler was thrust into the public eye when the on-line diary she kept for her friends exploded into Washington’s scandale du jour. Immediately fired from her job as mail girl in the office of Senator Mike DeWine (for "unacceptable use of Senate computers"), Jessica remains unemployed in Washington, D.C.