In my opinion, blogging and book writing go hand-in-hand. All it takes to bridge the gap from blog to book is a bit more forethought, discipline, and structure, and of course a publisher, and BOOM! you’ve got a book. Well, there’s a bit more to it than that. My experience co-authoring a book (The Art of SEO) was nothing like that. But still, it’s nice to romanticize the process — simply assemble your blog posts into a cohesive structure and send it off to a publisher. What could be simpler?

More often than not the author’s blog is an afterthought. The book came first. Then the blog came second as the book’s marketing vehicle, a complement/supplement. I’m not knocking it, but it’s great to see a high-quality blog turn into a high-quality book.

As both an author and a blogger, I can really appreciate when a blogger succeeds in transforming their blog into a book. It’s inspiring. One of my favorites is PostSecret, which was turned into a whole series of books. More prototypical examples of blog-to-book projects are The Long Tail (blog / book) and The Search (blog / book). Both are excellent blogs, and excellent books. Sometimes Twitter feeds turn into books too, like S*it My Dad Says. That’s some funny stuff. Now it looks like CEO blogger Steve Spangler is coming out with a book too. His is called Naked Eggs and Flying Potatoes. A curious title. In actuality I think his book is more of an amalgamation of his video content than his blog posts, but nonetheless the finished book looks impressive. Congrats Steve!

Folks often ask me if I’m going to write another book. My answer: I doubt it. It’s too painful (like birthing a baby, though, as a man, I can’t truly appreciate the pain of childbirth), and it pays less than minimum wage if you work out the numbers. Folks will then chime in with “Yeah, and why bother with a physical book anyways when everybody’s migrating online!” That I don’t agree with. There are a very large group of holdouts — me included — who still prefer the feel of printed books, who enjoy the experience of curling up with a good book rather than a laptop or ebook reader. And yes I own an iPad, but I don’t read books on it. And I don’t plan to anytime soon. Call me a Luddite.

Earlier this year, I put out a call on this site as to how many of the Fortune 500 companies were blogging. I guessed "somewhere in the 3-6% range currently." Yesterday I got an email from Wired Magazine’s editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, saying that he had wondered the same thing over dinner with Doc Searls. More specifically, they wondered whether companies that were thriving did not blog because they had less to gain from such openness while companies fighting to grow or regain market share were more inclined to blog, and whether this was a trend that could be correlated to companies’ business performance. So, Anderson set some Wired interns to the task and came up with this post describing what they found. Further, together with Ross Mayfield at Socialtext, they created the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki to keep track of the trend. (I’m gratified to note that my original estimate seems to be holding true: the collaborative effort has identified public blogs at 4% of the Fortune 500 firms.)

I’ve been head over heels about wikis for a while now. But, for most of us, they’ve been less than useful partially because they’re still too "geeky." At least, they have been for me. Well, those days are over. 37Signals, the company that brought you Basecamp, has rolled out Writeboard, a truly easy-to-use wiki.

I won’t go into detail here, but I do invite you to read my glowing review of the app on my blog. Trust me, you’ll like Writeboard. Like the rest of 37Signal’s products it’s an easy-to-use software application that really works. 

B.L. Ochman writes about this new project:

It’s 28 people who blog about PR all getting together next week to blog about making blogs part of the marketing mix. Being PR people, they’ve turned it into a big academic thing for the most part. I am sticking to practical stuff, examples only, no theory, as is my wont.
:>)

The New PR Wiki is an accompanying wiki.

Link

Todd S. has taken another approach to a directory on business blogs (which, in some sense, my site already is): he has created an alphabetized wiki. (“What’s a wiki?” you ask? It’s basically a blog that any reader can edit or contribute to. Here’s another definition, or just check out Todd’s site and you’ll get the idea.)

Definitely a different animal than my site, as all entries here have my subjective spin, plus categorization, while the BizBlogDirectory features descriptions by the site managers. My guess is it will get big fast. Something certainly to keep an eye on, and also a good place to register your blog, if you haven’t done so already.

Link