Blog : Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World

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Summary: The Los Angeles Times....
Review: ...got it right in their review of this book (a review which Hewitt snidely dismisses on his blog). This is a quickly dashed off screed of partisan hackery designed to make a quick buck for the holiday season. Full of howlers that would keep any self-respecting information technologist doubled up in laughter, it rambles pointlessly, overstating the influence of blogs on information dissemination on page after page.

Mr. Hewitt must have a hard time fitting his head through doorways.

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Summary: 1999 All Over Again?
Review: Don't get me wrong, I think this book is a good primer and a pointed commentary on the growing influence and impact of blogs in the information society. But "the death of MSM"? Sounds like the death of "bricks and mortar" touted a few years back.

Also, chapters 8 and 9 are summarized as follows: "To make money, sell ads on blogs catering to your target audience. Better yet, start your own blog and sell ads to others." It's deja vu all over again!

Depsite the eeire echos of the 1999 internet hype, this book is worth the read. If nothing else, it will give you ammunition to annoy your liberal acquaintances!

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Summary: IF ITS NOT CLOSE THEY CAN'T CHEAT
Review: Hugh Hewitt is an enthusiastic writer, analyst and blogger. This book is for Republicans and Conservatives and is an insiders long look at politics, elections and a very useful "What To Do Book".

Easily read and thoughtful, it makes the most hardened political junkie teachable.

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Summary: National Public TV personality/Talk Host/author now blogger
Review: Hugh Hewitt says bloggers (webloggers) beat out those who buy ink by the barrel and are the new fact checkers for the one-sided messengers in the MSM (main stream media). He's right!

A basic primer from a pioneer in the blogosphere. A leader of the pajamahadeen. A must read intro for journalists of every stripe and those who want to keep on the cutting edge.

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Summary: Blog New World
Review: Hugh Hewitt's newest book, "Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World" has a breathless urgency in its message about the current impact and future promise of blogs. Hugh presents practical and innovative approaches to corporate and niche blogging that will appeal to forward-thinking publishers, musicians, sports franchises, and just about any special interest group.

Hugh Hewitt is easy to listen to on his daily talk radio show, and he is equally easy to read. His style is briskly conversational, to the point, and always buttressed by meticulous research and presentation of facts.

Hugh closes "Blog" with a clarion call to readers to launch into the rapidly expanding blogosphere. His persuasive argument is so effective that it makes me grateful that my little blog, www.oneclearcall.blogspot.com, has been up and running since August 2004.


Rating:
Summary: Good Point, but Hard to Finish
Review: I agree with all the other reviewers. This book was given to me as a present, and it took all my willpower to read it because of the incessant need to talk politics. However. Mentioning that Fox News is Fair and Balanced--three times--and that CNN is dead, ("nobody's watching" ???) and calling CNN sophomoric names, and dismissing all mainstream media except Fox, really put me off. One challenge for Hugh...IMO blogs are going to run under the radar for two reasons. Few people have the time to read and click through all that info. Second, the people you really want reading the sites (newer computer users) now have computers full of adware and malware.

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Summary: Understanding New Communications Concepts
Review: I guess the easiest books to like are those that support the ideas that you already have. Therefore I think this book is great. Specifically, or perhaps I should say superficially, this book is on the development of Blogs that are primarily concerned with current events, particularly on comments about the breaking news.

Underneath the Blog, however, there's the bigger picture of the emergence of electronic communications of all type. Mr. Hewitt consentrates on blogs saying that old fashioned static web pages are a thing of the past. There are web pages, see www.newbooksinprint.com for instance that change every day, giving the latest books that are available free on the internet.

This kind of communications that is possible now is something new. I think, Mr. Hewitt is right when he compares it to the development of printing by Gutenberg. (Although when I said this at the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, Germany they didn't agree.) We are at the beginning of a basic fundamental change in how communications are made. Leaders in the area, like Mr. Hewitt are pioneering the trails that out descendents will follow.

Read this book, regardless of your political persuasion, just for the information and understanding it brings of new developments in communications.

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Summary: Like it, Don't Love it, But Blog About it
Review: I received my copy of [...]Hugh Hewitt's new book, Blog. It's a book that's having a significant impact in the blogsphere, particularly among Evangelical bloggers. What's the fuss?

I'm afraid I don't have a great answer to that question. I liked the book -- I really <em>wanted </em>to like it -- but I didn't <em>love</em> it.

Here's what I liked: Hewitt does a good job of demonstrating how the blogsphere has grown to rival, and in some celebrated recent examples such as "Rathergate," to supplant or at least upstage, traditional print and broadcast media. And, he makes some cogent, although not revolutionary, observations about how business organizations should utilize blogs and bloggers. He also refers to some useful blogs that newbies in the blogsphere will want to visit, although at times he seems mostly too be shilling for his blogging friends and promoting his own site.

Here's what I didn't like. The book reads like it was cranked out over a few long weekends. If you're looking for serious analysis of blogging as a social or political phenomenon, this isn't it. There are many breathless sections about how the blogsphere has "shattered" the "MSM" (Main Stream Media), interrupted with long block quotes and padded with filler such as an "Appendix" comprised of Hewitt's "early writings on blogging" and a second "Appendix" comprised of e-mails from visitors to Hewitt's website. Any 220 page book with nearly 70 pages of appendices from old, disjointed writings suggests, to me, that the book's main themes perhaps aren't that well developed. It also lacks an index, which again suggests perhaps some haste in getting to press.

The books' brevity might be understandable if it were a monograph on one or two tightly argued points. It isn't. In fact, it's difficult to tease out the books' main focus. Is it primarily a call to arms for conservative bloggers, or more of a business blogger's how-to? Is this book in the tradition of Sean Hannity or Stephen Covey? It seems to want to be both, and as a result does strike oil with either.

In addition to problems of style and organization, I think the book includes several important substantive missteps. It seems to me that Hewitt suffers from myopia when he compares blogging to the information revolution that followed Guttenberg's invention of the printing press. But blogging isn't the revolution; the Internet is the revolution. Blogging is just the latest tool made possible by the Internet. The sorts of discussions now happening in blogs once happened (and still do happen) on bulletin boards and chat rooms. Years ago they happened mostly on the Usenet. I would agree that blogging has accelerated this trend by making this sort of informal information exchange easier. Yet it's important to place blogging in context. Blogging may persist, or it may go the way of the Usenet as new tools arise. The Internet, though, is here to stay. A truly strategic vision for communication will embrace this new tool while recognizing its possibly transitory nature. At the very least, Hewitt should explain why blogging is here to stay.

Hewitt also spends little time on the potential <em>dangers </em>of the blogsphere. He does recognize that jihadist groups have taken to the Internet and blogging, which he seems to employ as a call to arms for good people to occupy the space. Yet, he seems so enchanted by the blogsphere's potential to correct perceived bias in the traditional print and broadcast media that he never addresses the way network effects can magnify the impact of <em>false</em> information. A case in point, which Hewitt ignores, is the post-election blogswarm about vote fraud started by a blogger whose statistical analysis of the exit polls was inaccurate. Hewitt even briefly refers to the concept of [...] memes, without acknowledging that memes are often bits of <em>false</em> information that replicate virulently over a network. (I'd give a cite to Hewitt's book where he references memes, but the lack of an index makes the job of searching too difficult).

Finally, Hewitt seems to sanguine about the commercialization of blogging. He goes so far as to suggest pricing models for blog banner ads. Call me a purist, but the last thing I want to see is the extensive commoditization of blogs. In fact, there's a real danger that the commercialization of blogs will signal the decline of the blogsphere. Public relations professionals have already recognized the importance of the blogsphere and are becoming adept at "seeding" stories in influential blogs, just as they seed stories through "leaks" to the traditional news media. A commercialized, coopted blogsphere will lose its authenticity. Surprisingly, Hewitt doesn't seem concerned about this. In my view, what we need in the blogsphere is writers who say what they think regardless of the consequences. Once you begin eating from the hands of sponsors, advertisers, and public relations flackers, you <em>become</em> the MSM.

So, if you're new to blogging or just curious about it and want to learn more, get Biz Stone's [...] Blogging, which contains much more nuts and bolts information about blog culture and tools. If you're an active blogger, read Hewitt's book, but blog about how much more interesting a book it could have been if it had been a more thorough analysis of the blogsphere's place in the Internet and the culture at large.

[...]

Rating:
Summary: LIKE A HALF CUP OF FRESH COFFEE
Review: The first 2 parts of the book have some excellent scholarship, you just wish Chapter 1 had sister chapters. Hugh starts Chapter 2 (on the Reformation) defensively, probably in opposition to pre-publication counsel to drop the analogy. Borrowing on the life-or-death upheaval of the Protestant Reformation to describe blogging's effect on media makes bloggers sound like glory craving talents claiming lordship over a new faith. Chapter 1 is spectacular and is diluted by the chapter 2 blather. [Confession: while I love my Protestant brethren, they do push my Catholic buttons from time to time.]

The subsequent chapters on media trends, blog hits and blog advertising are useful. The mention of the origin of the professorbainbridge.com blog (which is a great blog by the way) is motivating, and the suggestion of blogs for businesses and products is interesting -- you just think there could have been at least one concrete example dissected (maybe a blog on Firestone SUV tires, or on a soon to be good/bad stock pick?).

Since Hugh has been blogging for years now, the part on developing a blog, building hits, using web technology to analize hits and links, and booking advertising falls so far short of expectations. All those offerings were apparently sacrificed to get a book to market for the holidays. OK, I accept that and I still recommend the book, but I need 2 hot cups of coffee in the morning, and this book just seems like a half cup.

Rating:
Summary: BUY BLOG !!!
Review: This is an excellent new book by law professor, radio talk show host and Hugh Hewitt. Folks who have no idea what blogs are will be provided with an excellent intro to blogs-what they are, who runs them, why they're important. Bloggers and devotees of the blogosphere will gain a better grasp of the significance of the media revolution that blogs have ushered in.

Hewitt revisits recent episodes in the young history of blogs-Trent Lott's stupid comments at Strom Thurmond's birthday party, ex-NY Times editor in chief Howell Raines' role in the Jayson Blair scandal/saga, the Swift Boat Vets' exposure of John Kerry's bogus "Christmas in Cambodia", and Rathergate-the fake memos CBS so boldly proclaimed out of political bias. All of these episodes were carried by blogs, as Old Media/Legacy Media/MSM would have let these go, but for the diligence of bloggers.

Hewitt's succinct history of the blogosphere drives home its significance in creating a media reformation. In the same way the Protestant Reformation took place in light of newly-created printing press technology, today's New Media is made possible by the easy access to information and publishing provided by blogs on the internet. The result: information is now directly accessible to people faster and in proportions never imagined--and Old Media authorities will have to accept a new, diminished role in delivering news.

This book is the first big book on blogs by a top blogger, and with the recent release of the Whitewash Report over Rathergate, Hewitt's timing could not be better. (Let the Whitewash Report serve as proof that the blogosphere should never rest on its laurels or expect other outlets to carry water for it.) So go get it.