Web 2.0 Book

I’m happy to announce that Richard MacManus and I are writing a book about Web 2.0 for O’Reilly Media.

As many of you know, I’ve swallowed the Web 2.0 bug here at Bokardo and Richard has what is probably the most popular Web 2.0 blog, as well as a Web 2.0 column on Digital Web that we co-write. We’re really excited about taking all of this much further and fleshing it out into a book, especially for O’Reilly, who publishes most of the books on our bookshelves.

I can hear some of you groan, however, and ask “Why a book about such an amorphous topic? It’s all hype!”. Yes, there definitely has been a Naming Backlash, but I think that we’ve seen the term “web 2.0” take root now, and for better or worse it is working.

Our approach going forward is to use our blogs as a sounding board for the chapters as we write them. So expect posts to be more in-depth and detailed in the future here at Bokardo. It’s probably apparent that lately I’m simply writing whatever is in my head at the moment, and there isn’t much cohesion or context given for anything. I hope to change that by writing article-like posts that make much more sense. There won’t be as many, but they’ll be better.

As Richard noted, we’ve been really impressed with Chris Anderson’s Long Tail Blog. He’s going to write a tremendous book on the topic because of the feedback and discussion that the folks on the blog have generated (besides being a terrific writer in the first place). Our goal is to simply approximate that in some way. Even though we’re the ones who have to sit down and pound out thousands of words, most of the ideas aren’t in our heads. They’re in everyone else’s heads.

And I also hope that all the readers here at Bokardo challenge each and every word. One thing that I’ve always found really interesting is how all bloggers that I’ve talked to eventually realize that their readership is way more knowledgeable about everything than they are. I’m looking at you, Lurker.

And yes, you heard right. Unless you’re really lucky, you won’t get rich writing a book. For me personally, this is about describing a topic in the best way that I can, and hopefully learning a lot about writing in the process. Also, I hope there are ways that this writing will feed into our web research at UIE, so I can get a little economy of overlap going on.

And some of you out there are probably like us, wondering how people become authors of a book and how they might do it at some point in the future. All I can say is that book publishing is indeed open to everybody, most particularly open to people who are interested in a particular topic, especially if you’ve already written about it. So, if you’ve got a topic, make a blog about it, write up an outline for a book, and send it to a publisher. My guess is that fear is what stops many would-be authors.

I hope it doesn’t stop us.