Becoming a blogger takes practice, hard work, and, ultimately, a passion for the craft. Whether you plan to blog on politics or parenting, The Elements of Blogging is designed to give you the skills and strategies to get started, to sustain your work, and to seek out a robust audience. This book is loaded with practical advice on important topics such as determining a niche, finding the best stories, and blogging effectively and ethically. It features examples from both amateur and professional bloggers that show the techniques for building an argument, finding a voice, crafting a headline, and establishing a brand. Key features: Real-world applicability. This book includes thumbnail profiles of bloggers and their sites, which illuminate key skills you will need to become an effective blogger Interactivity. Each chapter features discussion points and exercises intended to get you to think about, reflect on, and apply the contents of each chapter Creativity. While this book dives into software and plug-ins for bloggers, its main goal is to cover how to write blogs on a myriad of topics: news, opinion pieces, travel, politics, art, and more. Visit the companion website: http://www.theelementsofblogging.com/

Blogs and Wikis have not been with us for long, but have made a huge impact on society. Wikipedia is the best known exemplar of the wiki, a collaborative site that leads to a single text claimed by no-one; blogs, or web-logs, have exploded into the mainstream through novelisations, film adaptations and have gathered huge followings. Blogs and wikis also serve to provide a coherent basis for a discourse analysis of specific web language. What makes these forms distinctive as genres, and what ramifications does the technology have on the language? Myers looks at how blogs and wikis: *allow for easier than ever publication *can claim to challenge institutional hierarchies *provide alternate perspectives on events *exemplify globalization *challenge demarcations between the personal and the public *construct new communities and more Drawing on a wide range of popular blogs and wikis, the book works alongside an author blog that contains regularly updated links, references and a glossary. An essential textbook for upper level undergraduates on linguistics and language studies courses, it elucidates, informs and offers insights into a major new type of discourse. This coursebook will include a companion website.

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.

Clear Blogging, an Apress Technology in Action book, answers in non-technical terms what blogging has to offer and why and how you should blog. If you've never read a blog, but keep hearing that term on the news, Clear Blogging shows why blogging has shaken up mainstream media, and how you could end up on CNN. If you've just begun reading blogs, it's your travel guide to the Blogosphere. Includes 50 interviews with successful bloggers who influence products, policy makers, potential employers and millions of readers and gain an online reputation - and real profits - from blogging.

'Weblogging' or 'blogging' has joined e-mail and Internet home pages as one of the most popular uses of the Internet. This book focuses on the British blogosphere, comparing British bloggers to the more researched US. Motivations covered include the desire to connect with others online, the need to express opinions or blow off steam, or to share experiences, and a growing financial motivation in the blogosphere. Other motivations explored include a desire to become a 'citizen journalist', a need for validation, the commercial possibilities of blogging and the possibility of turning your blog into a published 'book'.

"Language and Power in Blogs" systematically analyses the discursive practices of bloggers and their readers in eight English-language personal/diary blogs. The main focus is thereby placed on ties between these practices and power. The book demonstrates that the exercise of power in this mode can be studied via the analysis of conversational control (turn-taking, speakership and topic control), coupled with research on agreements and disagreements. In this vein, it reveals that control of the floor is strongly tied not solely to rates of participation, but more strikingly to the types of contributions interlocutors make. With its detailed linguistic analyses and comprehensive theoretical and methodological treatment of language use and power, the book is interesting for researchers and students working within the domains of pragmatics, discourse analysis, text linguistics and corpus linguistics, in both offline and online settings.