At the last Social Media Breakfast, I picked up a copy of Blog Blazers: 40 Top Bloggers Share Their Secrets, by successful blogger Stephane Grenier. The publisher (or the author?) made a box of copies available to the social media enthusiasts who showed up.
The book is a Q&A format series of interviews (conducted by email, it appears) with famous and successful bloggers, everyone from Aaron Wall to Yaro Starak.
Yes, it is organized alphabetically.
In fact, if I have a beef with the book, that's probably as good an example as anything of the author's unwillingness summarize or add value, to deviate from the formulaic way he set it up.
All the bloggers, with the exception of Seth Godin, get asked the same questions, in the same order.
There are cases where this just seems silly, like when "Steph" the author runs through the list of questions with "Stephane" the blogger. (Yes, it's the same person.) It also seems silly when a respondent replies with something along the lines of "I think I answered that question in my answer above." That's often enough, and somehow jarring every time.
This lack of critical editing and afterthought also leads Grenier to make a major error in the book, when he identifies "Manolo The Shoeblogger" as Manolo Blahnik, the famous shoe designer, in the chapter heading, even though the Shoeblogger has published a post trying to make it clear they are not one and the same. In the text of the chapter, in fact, the Shoeblogger says:
For the humble shoeblogger, the most exciting moment was when Maestro Manolo Blahnik the shoe designer, told the Times of London newspaper that he thought the Manolo's Shoe Blog was 'hilarous' [sic]. Ayyy! this was the Manolo the Shoeblogger proudest moment."
It seems to me that, if the author had carefully read the answers of the bloggers he was quizzing, he would not have mistakenly attributed the blog to the shoe designer. Or perhaps this is a problem introduced at the editing stage... but someone should have caught it, no?
Still, as a newer blogger, I have lots to learn, and there were takeaways for me from bloggers featured.
So, if you can put up with a formula that is, as my friend Francis Moran describes, "a mile wide and a pixel deep," then the book has some value to offer. It's a quick and (mostly) painless read.
