The first section briefly deals with the history and purpose of blogs, then gets to how to start your blog. There are practical details about where to blog and what to blog about, technical details about how to set up your blog, whether you can make big bucks with your blog (no), and how to deal with comments and trolls.

The two most helpful pages in the book are the list of Rules for Great Blogging (page 80) and Nora Ephron’s blog post about how she learned to blog (page 30.)

Here are the four of the eight most important rules for blogging, according to The Huffington Post Editors: blog often, perfect is the enemy of done, write like you speak, write short.

And Nora Ephron’s revelation about blogs is that they are like soap bubbles, ephemeral, lasting only a short time before they’re gone. So they don’t have to be perfect or polished, they just have to be NOW. And they don’t have to end, as essays do. They simply have to stop.

The practical advice stops after the first hundred pages, and then it’s pretty much an ad for The Huffington Post, with many sample posts from their stable of celebrity bloggers. If you’re eager to get blogging, you can skip the last half. The first half has everything you need to know, and a fair amount of inspiration as well. Recommended!
Rating: 4 / 5
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Sure, if you love The Huffington Post, or if you are friends with Arianna or Mike Drudge and they are planning to let you write articles on their sites, which already get huge amounts of traffic, you “may” find this book useful. For the other 99% of you, I suggest looking elsewhere, like Blogging For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech)). Sure it is geared to a tech crowd, but the information in it is much more general and has actually useful topics, like “How to Build Your Audience.”
Rating: 1 / 5
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As I was reading the book the question kept popping up – “Would I understand this if I were not a blogger or had not already moved through the problems of setting up a blog?” The Huffington authors do point potential blogger to sites where one can get up and running quickly. If one thinks they will be serious about blogging, then a book such as Lisa Sabin-Wilson’s “WordPress for Dummies” is an excellent second book to read. Sabin-Wilson takes the reader through the nuts and bolts of setting up WordPress, one of the primary software tools for operating a blog. While specific to WordPress, the Sabin-Wilson book is the more complete guide.

The Huffington Post book lacks an index. This is a big mistake for many readers who, when reading a book touted as a “Complete Guide,” will be looking for specific information on a particular topic. Instructional books should contain an index.

Twelve pages are devoted to Blogroll or links to other blog pages. Readers will find many interesting sites among this list. As expected, this book has a political and news slant, fully expected since the experiences come from Huffington Post bloggers. One can easily adapt their suggestions to a blog of your own choice with a little imagination.

This book was to be a Christmas gift, but I could not wait a few weeks to read it. I did not put it down, so there you have my positive recommendation. This is a wonderful little book that will inspire you to take your interest/passion to the next level – the Internet.

Lowell Herr

ITA Wealth Management
Rating: 4 / 5
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First, the book has extra large outside margins to accommodate occasional quotes, but a quick flip through the book shows that as just a lot of blank space padding out the book and giving it a more square shape that your average book. Seems like a waste of paper meant to make the book’s uncommon shape stand out in physical book stores, and my little eco-gripe with the book.

While no one would deny that The Huffington Post is a successful and influential blog, and is therefor in a place to offer advice, the incessant talking about how great it is and the stories it broke, combined with a lot of “best of” selections is overkill. I suppose if one had never read or heard of blogs before, it would be useful to read so many examples of what gets written in blogs (anything!), but I would imagine most of the book’s readers read blogs every day already. At least one-third of the book is about how the Huffington Post got started or excerpts from the site. Personally, I didn’t find it all that relevant in a “how to blog” book. It’s not as though a reader has no other way of finding out, if they wanted to, “What kind of things are on The Huffington Post?” The authors repeatedly entice potential bloggers with the fact that one of the great things about blogging is that there is no editor dictating a piece’s length to you. It seems like this book could have used a cut-happy editor.

Lastly, there’s a bunch of rally-the-troops, “Even YOU, a lil’ stay-at-home mom, who wants to write about your boring and petty frustrations, CAN HAVE A BLOG!” stuff. Some of us, however, don’t need to be sold on the concept of blogging. Some of us already have topics that interest us and experience writing about them. Some of us aim to reach wider audiences than sharing summaries of our daily lives on LiveJournal. I would have liked to see a chapter about fine-tuning one’s messages and reaching target audiences for people who, pardon my snobbery, but actually have something of value to say to the world. I realize that most blogs are just tiny personal journals meant only to entertain the author and their friends, but I’d have liked to see a lot more from this book beyond the predominantly surface-level advice for people who are coming from a place of, “Golly, what could I write about? What are my interests? What are blogs?”

All in all, though, I do recommend the book for beginners, and cautiously recommend it for non-beginners. I wish it had less fluff and more intermediate-level advice. Many of the reviewers here praise the book for helping readers find their voice and a topic that interests them, and that’s all good and well, but what about people who already had those two things covered long before picking up the book?
Rating: 3 / 5
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The book starts by giving the history of blogging and then in Chapter 2 goes into the basics of getting started. This chapter reads like a FAQ section giving the reader advice on everything from figuring out what to write about to mentioning the variety of software available to blogging to the issue of copyright.

Chapter 3 is all about getting your blog noticed which will be especially appreciated by those who have already started blogging but who may want more traffic. The tips are very practical and from my own experiences actually work. It also gives tips on monetizing your blog but is realistic about the fact that a blog isn’t an instant ticket to riches.

Chapter 4, my personal favorite, is about finding your voice. Given how many blogs are already out on the internet I think for many new bloggers this chapter is helpful as it asks you to consider both what you will feel most passionate about and what you think your potential reader would want out of your blog.

Chapter 5 takes the notion of getting your blog noticed one step further by talking about how you can foster a community through your blog.

Chapter 6 is the history (albeit a brief one) of the Huffington Post and Chapter 7 talks about the impact of the blogosphere on mainstream media. These were honestly my two least favorite chapters as they were less practical in nature and particularly in the case of chapter 7, I have seem similar content covered in other books. (I work in communications so the impact of bloggers on mainstream media is something that is constantly up for discussion.) However, I imagine that if I were a bigger Huffington Post fan I probably would have enjoyed chearing more about the history. I imagine the same would be true for Chapter 7 if I had not already read so much about this.

The last section of the book features the blog roll, more blogging terms, website resource list, and also a ‘best of’ Huffington Blog posts.

Overall I think this was a pretty solid book and provided a good balance of giving tips, providing blogger commentary, and giving a lay of the land. I think the blogger quotes were especially interesting because it was intriguing to see their takes on things. I also loved when the book contrasted how a mainstream newspaper covered a particular even with how they thought a blogger would cover it. It did a good job of highlighting the difference in tone.

The only thing that I disliked about the book at times was the heavy use of sidebars. On one hand, I liked it because this content was interesting and calling it out as a sidebar made it easy to reference. At other times I found it distracted me from the main text because the side bars sometimes took up the majority of a page. I often had to flip back and reread content to remind myself of where I was which broke the my flow. In my opinion, this is only a minor complaint. I also think the book had a lot of perspectives of writers/actors/reporters turned bloggers and could have benefited from having more tips from more ‘citizens turned bloggers’ as they say. This isn’t to say they don’t have any, because they do, but given that I think many of those who read this book will fall into that camp I think having more can only be helpful.

Overall, I think this was a great book. I definitely walked away with ideas of how I could make my blog more successful and enjoyed reading some of the ‘best of’ content.

Rating: 4 / 5
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