Tech-savvy journalist Scott Rosenberg, co-founder of Salon.com, has a new book on the history of blogging, Say Everything, coming out this week, and judging by the two sample chapters posted on his Web site, it's a must-have.

I loved Rosenberg's previous book, Dreaming in Code, which was a Geertzian thick description of a software development project. This time, he's turned his journalistic skills and geek's eye for detail on the rise of blogging, a brash undertaking when the medium is still evolving, but Rosenberg provides a critically important look at where we are and how we got here.

In the first chapter, Rosenberg describes proto-blogger Justin Hall and how blogging began to fork off from the static shovelware pages common in the early days of the Web. Not just the tech, Rosenberg gets inside Hall's head and tells a great story with insight and sensitivity, and in so doing, provides an important lens into the medium.

Rosenberg's other online sample is chapter nine, "Journalists vs. Bloggers" and it is an absolutely brilliant crystallization of the various debates that have been swirling around pro and citizen journalism for years. If you want to get up to speed, read this chapter. Here's a typical chunk:

The rise of blogging exposed just how porous the line between “journalist” and “non-journalist” really was. Some observers began to use the term “citizen journalism” to describe the resulting profusion of new forms of amateur reporting and experiments in community-based information-gathering. The label was embraced by journalists and educators like Dan Gillmor and Jay Rosen, a professor at New York University, who defined it thus: “When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another, that’s citizen journalism.” Walt Mossberg, the Wall Street Journal’s popular personal technology columnist, liked to make fun of citizen journalism by likening it to “citizen surgery,” and the joke always won him a laugh. But it was a poor analogy. It suggested that journalism was a field like medicine, one that required an elaborate training regime and rigorously policed professional standards. That has never been the case. And if it were, if our lives really did depend on the quality of journalists’ work, then in recent years much of the profession lay open to charges of malpractice.
— Chapter Nine

Heh heh. Citizen surgery. You're soaking in it.

If you want the wiki page on the phenomenon of blogging, I highly recommend this book. And for those with a particular interest in the journalism part of the story, I'd also suggest checking out Rosenberg's blog and following him on Twitter. Who knows — maybe you'll end up in his next book.

Resources:
Say Everything Web site
Scott Rosenberg's Wordyard (blog)
scottros on Twitter

Annoyed footnote: Thanks to the RI Legislature which pissed off Amazon with their dumbass referral tax idea, I no longer have the ability to link directly to the book: Amazon cancelled my affiliate account. The link above IS NOT A REFERRAL. It is a CONTENT LINK to Scott Rosenberg's site. He doesn't live in Rhode Island, so you can click thru to Amazon from his site if you want to buy his book. Thank you ever so much, legislators. What a totally stupid idea.