A Romantic View of Weblogs
Eastgate's website includes a Mark Bernstein review of Rebecca Blood's The Weblog Handbook. Excerpts from Bernstein's review:

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Rebecca Blood's The Weblog Handbook is an inexorably romantic guide to building and cultivating a weblog. Weblogs are simply Web sites that feature news and opinion, updated frequently, and prominently displaying the most recent information. Almost unheard-of only a few years ago, weblogs have zoomed to prominence; Blood estimates that we may soon be able to choose among 500,000 weblogs, recording everything from teen age romance to the frontiers of scientific research, from celebrity book tours to revolutionary politics....

Blood warns of the personal hazards of writing weblogs and proposes a variety of rules and remedies for avoiding common pitfalls. Trying to update a personal weblog from the work place, for example, is a recipe for disaster; even if you don't succumb to the temptation to write in public about office politics or water-cooler gossip, you risk discovery by snooping managers who may take a dim view of romantic self-expression on company time. If you mention your children or their playmates on your web site, you might expose their names or whereabouts to stalkers. If you obsess about the popularity of your weblog, you will always find that others are more popular than you. If you dedicate yourself to building popularity for its own sake, Blood warns, you may doom your work to bland superficiality.

The growing importance of weblog clusters -- the self-assembling networks of weblogs that share common sympathies, interests, and links -- is prominent in Blood's discussions of Community and Living Online. She highlights the importance of linking to other work, even if it maintains an opposing view, and emphasizes that giving due credit is both good manners and good strategy....Polite and subtle strategies (such as linking to a weblog and then following the link yourself, just to be certain your site shows up in the referrer logs) often prove more effective self-marketing tools than publicity stunts or starting a fight....

It does not often occur to Blood that the weblog's persona need not be an authentic portrait of the artist, nor that the events the weblog depicts might be planned for effect instead of reflecting the writer's spontaneous (though excellent!) whims. Yet it is possible for a weblog to be plotted and planned: the diaries of Kaycee Nicole, a teenaged girl suffering from leukemia whose weblogs captivated a broad audience, were not less moving because Kaycee turned out to be a fictional character. In this light, weblogs take on aspects of both fiction and performance, but the romantic approach leaves little room for either....

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