Roger Ebert finds his voice

Roger Ebert, profiled in Esquire magazine, keeps a blog at the Chicago Sun-Times that has become his voice now that he has lost his physical one. It’s a moving piece about Ebert’s life today since his lost his voice to cancer and complications that ensued from cancer treatment.

I point the Esquire article out here because of this paragraph about Ebert’s blog:

There are places where Ebert exists as the Ebert he remembers. In 2008, when he was in the middle of his worst battles and wouldn’t be able to make the trip to Champaign-Urbana for Ebertfest—really, his annual spring festival of films he just plain likes—he began writing an online journal. Reading it from its beginning is like watching an Aztec pyramid being built. At first, it’s just a vessel for him to apologize to his fans for not being downstate. The original entries are short updates about his life and health and a few of his heart’s wishes. Postcards and pebbles. They’re followed by a smattering of Welcomes to Cyberspace. But slowly the journal picks up steam, as Ebert’s strength and confidence and audience grow. You are the readers I have dreamed of, he writes. He is emboldened. He begins to write about more than movies; in fact, it sometimes seems as though he’d rather write about anything other than movies. The existence of an afterlife, the beauty of a full bookshelf, his liberalism and atheism and alcoholism, the health-care debate, Darwin, memories of departed friends and fights won and lost—more than five hundred thousand words of inner monologue have poured out of him, five hundred thousand words that probably wouldn’t exist had he kept his other voice. Now some of his entries have thousands of comments, each of which he vets personally and to which he will often respond. It has become his life’s work, building and maintaining this massive monument to written debate—argument is encouraged, so long as it’s civil—and he spends several hours each night reclined in his chair, tending to his online oasis by lamplight. Out there, his voice is still his voice—not a reasonable facsimile of it, but his.

This is blogging at its most powerful and effective, when it connects the blogger with the audience in ways that simply weren’t possible before.

Read the Esquire article, and check out Ebert’s blog.

Blogging For Dummies, 3rd Edition is out!

Blogging for Dummies, 3rd Edition is out in the real world and available to order anytime you’re ready. This edition includes several entirely new chapters, including “Starting a WordPress Blog,” “Starting a Micro Blog,” “Joining the Twitterverse,” and “Diving in to Social Networking.” Shane and I are really excited to know what you think!

Blogging For Dummies III: Look for it in 2010!

I did something pretty exciting this week: I signed a contract to write the third edition of “Blogging For Dummies!”

“Blogging For Dummies, 2nd Edition” came out in January of 2008. Shane Birley was my co-author, and we had a lot of fun (there was also some stress) in working through the book. We really poured as much knowledge as we could into the 368 pages of the book, but you can never cover everything. Doing a third edition is going to give us a chance to respond to the feedback we have received from readers, and to get even more great information into the book. So much has happened in the blogosphere in the year and a half since the second edition was published!

The third edition will be published in January 2010, and I’ll let you know as soon as it is available to pre-order on Amazon.com. In the meantime, we’re about to embark on the writing part of the job, so if you have any suggestions for things that simply must be part of the third edition, or that we got wrong or missed the first time, leave a comment and let us know! This is a great chance to shape how the book comes together so that it is exactly the resource your need!

There was some other exciting “Blogging For Dummies” news in the last couple of weeks: I received copies of “Blogging For Dummies, 2nd Edition” that looked a little odd. Turns out the book has been translated into Italian! “Blog per negati” is what the book is titled in Italian. It’s pretty fun to see it, even though I don’t speak Italian myself. There is also a “Blogging fur Dummies” (German).