Checking my ego feed in my news aggregator yesterday I saw that two bloggers had posted reviews of the book. The first, Scot Hacker, a personal friend and longtime web colleague, liked the book quite a lot, calling it “an exploration – at turns straightforwardly journalistic, nearly stream-of-consciousness, and scholarly – on the transformative power of online communities,” and he selected the following quotation from the book to illustrate his comments:
On first discovering online journals, most people find them puzzling, a paradox. Who would put their private diary online? … Omigod, my mother read my blog! Indeed, there are countless stories of people who misjudged the effects of putting their thoughts and ideas into the public domain and who lived to regret the confidences broken, the parties offended by their snarky comments, their exposed secrets. In time, though, anyone who continues the exhilarating tightrope walk of online self-examination will manage to cultivate that gray area between public and private that seems just personal and revealing enough to draw in readers and invite scrutiny but that still holds back what truly belongs out of public view entirely.
The second, Andrew Sinclair, holds a nearly opposite view, finding the book lacking in insight and analysis and too heavily reliant on buzzwords and feature lists.
(He also thought our cover ripped off David Weinberger’s Small Pieces, Loosely Joined. I tried posting a comment on his blog but it has not appeared, so I may have failed. In it I explained the my publisher actually hired two designers to come up with cover ideas – a highly unusual investment of resources for any publisher – and that we all liked the final cover design the best, but that any homage to Weinberger’s book’s cover was strictly coincidental.)
While of course I prefer positive reviews, I welcome any and all feedback on my books and other writing, as I strive to improve and meet the needs of my readers, so thank you Scot and Andrew.