Buy this book
Books N Bytes participates in affiliate programs including Amazon Associates and Bookshop.org. We may earn a commission when you purchase through our links at no extra cost to you.
Essential Blogging is the 2002 O'Reilly technical reference co-written by Cory Doctorow, Rael Dornfest, J. Scott Johnson, Shelley Powers, Benjamin Trott, and Mena Trott. The book is a practical how-to on running a blog circa 2002, covering Movable Type, Blogger, Radio UserLand, and the then-emerging RSS ecosystem. As a technical reference for the platforms involved, it is a historical document. As a snapshot of a specific moment in the open web, it is more interesting than that suggests.
Doctorow's contributions cover the policy side: copyright and content licensing in a syndication context, the politics of comment moderation, the question of how blogging interacts with traditional publishing. Mena and Benjamin Trott (who built Movable Type) cover the Movable Type implementation. The technical material is dated. The conceptual material on syndication, comments, and the politics of platforms aged considerably better than it should have.
Recommended for readers interested in the early-2000s open web (Carl Malamud's Exploring the Internet, David Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined), and for anyone curious how Cory Doctorow's later digital-rights writing took shape. Three stars and a useful artifact rather than a useful reference.
Related reads
If you liked Essential Blogging
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
by Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow's 2003 debut. Reputation economies, post-scarcity Disneyland, and one of the cleanest near-future SF visions of its decade.
Eastern Standard Tribe
by Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow's second novel. Time-zone tribes, an asylum-committed protagonist, and a meditation on belonging in a globalized communication world.
More by this author