The Long Tail from Chris Anderson -Blogging your next book

A look at the stats of Chris Anderson'sblog - provides "book development" bloggers (authors) with some reasonable understanding of the reach of a blog by a well known public intellectual - in the audience range of 5000 a day or so.

Chris subtitles his blog A public diary on the way to a book and joins my friend Tom Barnett who describes using his blog to accelerate the writing and publishing of his second book Blue Print for Action which Tom says was way easier that writing the first book because of the feedback he gained from his blog audience during the writing period.

Here's what he says in his The Gift of Blogging

The best compliments I get on PNM are of the "you're just talking about the same ideas
I've been talking about for years!" sort. Sometimes, the excitement of these missives
rises to the level of almost accusing me of vision plagiarism ("We think alike!"), but mostly they just constitute a celebration of connectivity ("We think alike!"). Either way,these are the best sort of compliments because they signal the portability of the ideascontained within the book, and that sort of "aha!" feeling is crucial to the reproducibility of the strategic concept. In short, your great idea is yours alone, but your great vision is everybody's together--otherwise it's just your great opinion.

If PNM generated those sorts of compliments in spades, then BFA should generate them
all the more (hopefully, along with fewer "young man, narrowly read" carps because
BFA's meta-analysis focuses on the works of others more than on my past thinking), and the blog will be the reason.

The blog, therefore, becomes the giant feedback loop that raises the reproducibility factorof BFA by an order of magnitude. It makes PNM "the series" the vision that just keepson visioning.


I copied Tom's quote from a pdf download from his blog.Here is a list of the pdfs which contains The Gift of Blogging

Archives for The Newsletter from Thomas P.M. Barnett

I have also corrected the original post based on useful feedback from Chris Anderson