Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World's Top Bloggers | 
 enlarge | Author: Michael A. Banks
Publisher: Wiley
Category: Book
List Price: $24.99
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Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 82188
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 298
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.6 x 1.2
ISBN: 0470197390
Dewey Decimal Number: 006.7
EAN: 9780470197394
ASIN: 0470197390
Publication Date: December 10, 2007
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Condition: Ships immediately! Perfect and New! 2007 Hardcover.
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
 Bloggers, read this! September 30, 2008
Teh Ai Lee (Petaling Jaya, Selangor, MALAYSIA)
Page 30: "A successful blog is like a hungry pet that needs to be walked, fed, washed, cleaned up after, and loved regularly."
Nothing beats hearing from the top bloggers themselves about what it takes to achieve blogging success. Michael A. Banks has taken this huge effort of interviewing 30 of world's top bloggers. He shortlisted interesting blogs in several categories from business trends and the inner workings at Microsoft to parenting tips, personal secrets, DIYs, technology tips and many more.
A lot of background work went into the project: Finding the 30 people to interview by consulting the Technorati lists, Digg, Alexa and other resources; research on each blogger that often resulted in follow-up questions and revisions, contacting and inviting them to be a subject in the book; and logistic arrangements where mostly those interviews were conducted by telephone due to advantage of audio cues, not to mention other stuff too such as recorder and other telecommunication facilities. When cancellation happens, he had to quickly find backups and then there were technical glitches. After all of that, there were transcriptions, writing and editing. Although this is mostly a book about business blogging, the tips and secrets shared are very much applicable to personal bloggers as well.
There is a standard set of questions though you could see them worded differently in different interviews, and then you'll see them progress into more complex matters such as getting traffic, maintaining quality, mining for subject matter, dealing with difficulties, and so on. Some of the questions posted were as follows (not in their exact wordings):
1) What inspired the bloggers to start blogging?
2) Were they blogging for money?
3) How much time do they spend blogging?
4) Do they post or drop comments on other blogs?
5) What tips or advice do they offer other bloggers?
... and many more, in context with the progression of the interview.
At the end of each interview, readers can review the main points that are of special interest to them under the section "Points to Review". Recurring themes seem to be in order in most, if not all the interviews i.e.
- Write with passion
- Find a niche and focus on that niche
- Keep up to date by reading other blogs that interests you
- Use RSS
- Write well (grammatically correct, friendly tone, etc.)
I'd love to quote Chris Anderson in his interview: "A blog is a scratch-pad, and a discipline to collect your thoughts, compose your thoughts, advance your thoughts, and do it in public in a way that can amplify your thoughts by not only reaching an audience, but also getting feedback on your thoughts."
THE BLOGGING HEROES that I owned is full of highlights, with notes in the margin, and a bit of doodle here and there. It's a book that stimulates thinking and once you see something useful, you can't wait to apply them. It affirms some of practices I've already incorporated in my blogging and that's reassuring. My favourite interview is Frank Warren of PostSecret, partly because his blog has been one of my favourites for the longest time, and also it's amazing to read how he organizes his weekly post by going through the creative process of looking through thousands of postcards that he receives on a daily basis.
This is truly a very readable book. Get into the heartbeat of these top bloggers and get a feel of what drives them (passion and not money). No matter at what stage of blogging you're at, this book will be a gem. I also like the bright green word cloud cover cleverly designed by Michael Trent.
 Thoroughly solid August 25, 2008
Karen Tiede (Raleigh, NC)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This was an intriguing book to pick up at the bookstore and thumb through, although less fulfilling to read. Most of the bloggers are full-time paid, and most of them report on the very latest up-to-the-minute breaking news in their mostly-technical field. Most of them give you pretty much the same advice: Write about what you care about, and don't use black hat SEO techniques.
Frank Warren, of PostSecret, is the only completely out-of-the-box blogger covered.
I'll take comfort from the assurances that if I keep putting good content out into the blogosphere, Google will eventually find me. I'll add a few new writers to my RSS feeds. Elsewise, my blogging life will not change as a result of this book.
Good to have read; find it at the library, or buy it new or used according to your book budget.
 Good Book to Read in the Store July 2, 2008
S. Mohammed (USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I did not find this book useful. The author has spent time interviewing famous bloggers and compiled it. Most of the information is available online . Its a book which you can read when your are browsing in the store. Not worth to buy it
The new social media May 18, 2008
Ilya Grigorik (Toronto, ON, Canada)
Looking for an inside edge on the new full-contact sport that blogging has evolved to? Then, arguably, the group interviewed by Michael Banks is the one to consult for advice. Sprinkled with helpful hints and ideas, it is a book that I would recommend to any blogger, albeit with one reservation: you get diminishing returns with every interview you read. While incredibly consistent in their advice - passion, niche, consistency, networking - it almost feels superficial after reading it for the twentieth time. I hope to see an updated version of this book sometime in the future, and I hope that the author will dig deeper, and try to expose more of the personality trends and quirks of each of the bloggers.
A great group, but May 8, 2008
G. Steen (Baltimore, Md USA)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Internet books are getting a little too cookie cutter. I blame the editors for this one. Wisdom takes more than 2 hours to read and needs more than a interview questionnaire. The author is blind to the 3 principles that he presents through the bloggers: passion - there is no passion in this book. Uniqueness - basically most of the bloggers all give the same recommendations. Content - the repetition here is unforgivable. What makes these bloggers unique is their obsession, but the author needs to dig deeper if he wants to find some real wisdom. Many there isn't any.
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