Say Everything: How Blogging Began
I just finished reading an advance copy of Scott Rosenberg's new book on the history of blogging, called, appropriately enough, Say Everything. It is excellent, and I'm not just saying that because I made the index with my long-ago foray as founder of an early (early!) blogging service called GrokSoup.
Rosenberg's book is funny, authoritative, full of great-great stories and anecdotes, and admirably even-handed about a bunch of largely unsympathetic cranks who need more Vitamin D on a regular basis. He gets to the heart of what is really going on -- which is the technology-driven democratization and atomization of media -- without wasting time huffing and puffing about why anyone should pay attention to people who don't have the imprimatur of traditional media.
Bloggers being bloggers, I have to pick at least one nit. While the whole "who was the first blogger" subject admittedly gets tired in a hurry, it is surprising that Jorn "Robot Wisdom" Barger and Dave "Scripting News" Winer get deserved mentions in that regard, but TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer doesn't. Whatever you might say about Jim, there is no denying he was doing rapid-fire, blog-type entries back back in 1996-97 when the whole blogging thing was getting going. Alright, alright, it's a picayune point.
Highly recommended.