Blog books

You probably have your favorite blogs to visit each day, but there are countless other blogs that you could never find on your own and that could potentially be added to the top of your favorites! Blogosphere: Best of Blogs is a collection of the blogs you’ve heard about and the ones still waiting to be discovered. Organized into sections based on interests and moods, you’ll find a listing of the best blogs out there, along with the reasons why they’ve made the list. Complete with searching tips and strategies, Blogosphere will help you find the greatest voices in the blogging universe.

"The title of the book is not only intended to describe the movement toward networked social and political action, but like The Long Tail, Groundswell, and Tipping Point, it’s predisposed for buzzword status. Which is to say it’s potentially a term that transcends the book itself and becomes a part of the language we use, where the entire meaning of the book can be conveyed in a single word: CauseWired…" (MaxGladwell.com, October 7, 2008)

"Tom Watson’s book, CauseWired ... is a must read for nonprofits, community organizers, social entrepreneurs and advocates looking for motivation and examples of social media at work." (Lucy Bernholz, November 13, 2008)

"CauseWired is the first book focused on making sense of social media in the nonprofit world. Watson not only gets it-but he also explains why social media matters in understandable terms. Tom Watson's CauseWired, is must reading for anyone in the nonprofit world." (Blackbaud.com, September 17, 2008)

"It’s the perfect book to hand an executive director or board member or Communications VP who may not be as hands on with these tools as we are - and needs to understand the big picture." (Beth Kanter, November 3, 2008)

"A fascinating chronicle of the way in which social media and connectedness is changing the face of philanthropy and activism." (Cased.com, October 19,

2008)

"Some books come and go very quickly. Others are stickier and crystallize and capture a moment in time. CauseWired by Tom Watson fits perfectly into the latter category…At first glance the ribald, roiling world of online activism can feel overwhelmingly chaotic - and that’s exactly why CauseWired is so important. Watson makes sense of this new world by using real-world people and stories and creates a fun, fast read — go and get yourself a copy!" (Allison Fine, Social Citizens, October 23, 2008)

From the Foreword by Jean Case, CEO of the Case Foundation:

"From every direction, new opportunities to get involved are being presented and developed by a new breed of civic leaders and entrepreneurs.

And though the debate over how best to blend business models and nonprofit missions continues, the integration of entrepreneurial thinking and online tools into philanthropic ventures and the equally important integration of giving and nonprofit sensibility into corporate cultures are well underway.

"CauseWired does a wonderful job chronicling exactly that — the imaginative and bold ways people have chosen to make their voices and their causes heard using new tools, new technologies, and new social relationships.

"What is more, it provides an instructional narrative for anyone who wants to play a role in building this new culture of giving."

An eye-opening guide to the massive societal impact of online social networks

For today's super-wired, always-on, live-life-in-public young Americans, the causes they support define who they are. Societal aspirations have so permeated the "net native" population that causes have become like musical tastes. CauseWired illustrates wired causes in action, bringing real-world stories to readers.

The first book to track the massive societal impact on causes of online social networks--from blogs, to video, to the rise of social networks, CauseWired reveals the extraordinary influence of online social networks--in raising money for charity, in changing the political climate and electing candidates, and in raising consciousness for causes.

From Facebook causes and campaigns on MySpace, to a raft of new startups and innovative projects, and political movements like the Obama campaign and Save Darfur, this immensely relevant book delivers actionable research and recommendations to help readers launch their own successful wired social campaigns.

Tom Watson (Mount Vernon, NY) is the publisher of onPhilanthropy.com and founder of newcritics.com, an online journal of culture. A contributing writer to the Huffington Post with a 25-year professional career that includes the founding of two companies and several popular online publications, he is Chief Strategy Officer of Changing Our World Inc., a national philanthropic services company.

MESSAGE BOARD
About Genesis Bell Queensheba at 1:02 a.m.
i’ve heard you’d better not leave your guy alone with her! not if you DON’T want to lose him

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.

The second “version” of the Internet, known in geek terms as “Web 2.0,” has created opportunities for organizations to expand the capability of offering services for their clients using only online tools. Web 2.0 includes the use of podcasts, blogs, and dynamic web sites. One industry that is sure to take advantage of the new online collaboration tools that Web 2.0 provides is real estate.

One of the last markets to be radically changed by technology due to its complexity and the exceedingly large number of players involved in each transaction is quickly catching up with other industries such as travel and online stock trading.  Many tools are available for real estate professionals to help them list and sell more homes and to provide better service to their clients. If they don’t adopt many of these tools, they threaten their business for the long term. Authors Dani Babb and Alex Lazo point out that there are ways for professionals to overcome these obstacles, including the expanded use of technology. This book explores some of the ways to do that using dynamic and useful tools online.  

Blog Theory offers a critical theory of contemporary media. Furthering her account of communicative capitalism, Jodi Dean explores the ways new media practices like blogging and texting capture their users in intensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance. Her wide-ranging and theoretically rich analysis extends from her personal experiences as a blogger, through media histories, to newly emerging social network platforms and applications.
Set against the background of the economic crisis wrought by neoliberalism, the book engages with recent work in contemporary media theory as well as with thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj ?i?ek. Through these engagements, Dean defends the provocative thesis that reflexivity in complex networks is best understood via the psychoanalytic notion of the drives. She contends, moreover, that reading networks in terms of the drives enables us to grasp their real, human dimension, that is, the feelings and affects that embed us in the system.
In remarkably clear and lucid prose, Dean links seemingly trivial and transitory updates from the new mass culture of the internet to more fundamental changes in subjectivity and politics. Everyday communicative exchangesÑfrom blog posts to text messagesÑhave widespread effects, effects that not only undermine capacities for democracy but also entrap us in circuits of domination.

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.

Among more than 102,000,000 blogs, a few stand out as influential, ground-breaking, and singularly successful. These thirty bloggers, who write about everything from business trends to parenting, have been featured in Wired magazine, Popular Science, and on CNN, NPR, MSNBC, and 20/20. In one-on-one conversations with Michael A. Banks, these innovative, creative thinkers have shared their tactics, their philosophies, what drives them, how they mine for subject matter, and their personal secrets for success. Come and learn from the masters.

Gracie Doe, a keen observer of human nature, prefers to blog---keep an online journal on her anonymous website--about her classmates at Big Lake High, not befriend them. But when a new girl moves to town and discovers Gracie's Internet blog identity, Gracie is forced to discover God's purpose in belonging, and she recruits three very different girls for her 'Blog Team.'

“Riverbend,” the Iraqi woman whose “articulate, even poetic prose packs an emotional punch” (The New York Times), continues her dispatches from her native Baghdad.

Interweaving commentary on major events since October 2004, with compelling stories about her own life as well as her family’s daily struggles, this is journalism from ground zero recording both occupation and insurgency.