The blookers, the blooks and the blogs14 April 2006
Such is the present popularity of blogs that it is almost unnecessary to explain that the word blog is a corruption of the words web logs or that they are basically online journals. But internet users may not be so aware of a new craze about blooks - popular blogs published in print.
This month the blooking world dished out its inaugural set of awards, named the Blooker prize after the famous Man Booker prize for fiction.
The top accolade went to Julie Powell from the US for her blog-to-book conversion Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, One Tiny Apartment Kitchen, netting the author a cool $2,000 in prize money.
Ms Powell's original blog detailed her day-to-day attempts to emulate the culinary achievements of renowned US chef Julia Child by cooking all the recipes in her definitive tome Mastering the Art of French Cooking within a year.
Writing in his own blog, Paul Jones, a member of the Blooker prize judging committee, said: "A great blook is not a website shovelled onto paper.
"The deeply personal story of an obsession leads us all to see what could be trivial and indulgent as a personal and, as it turns out, communal art, an art of transformation and of conquest, of egg dishes and of self-doubt."
Indeed Ms Powell revealed that she initially wrote the blog because she was looking for a "challenge". With the blook having sold 100,000 copies already and a big screen adaptation in the works, she can safely say its one challenge she has overcome.
Top dog blogs
Estimates suggest that there are 60 million separate blogs on the internet, the majority of which are originally written for personal interest, but many snowball into something much bigger, such as Ms Powell's.
Just as a wide variety of subjects are covered by blogs, the bloggers that write them are also drawn from a broad cross-section of society, with many companies and small businesses now endorsing official blogs.
Blogs could benefit and are advantageous for small businesses for a number of reasons.
- They are easy to maintain and do not require training for staff
- Small firms could write collaborative blogs encouraging employee participation
- Blogs can be a great company promotional tool
- They can increase traffic to websites via search engine optimisation
- They're free!
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