I did want to take just a moment to come up for some air and write a quick post to let you know I am alive and well, and rushing to get up to speed on “everything Wiley EMEA.”  Much more soon.

If you have ever seen Guy interview someone, or read an online interview conducted by him, you know his questions are generally straight to the point, a little dangerous, and usually a little over the top – which of course is why I like Guy Kawasaki’s interviews.

Darren gets to answer some great questions about blogging, but his response to Guy’s question about the lack of comments on marketing guru Seth Godin’s blog was very insightful.

However another stroke of genius (I’m not sure if it’s intended) with this approach is that Seth has made his blog a little more viral by not having comments. What happens when he writes something that people want to respond to? In many cases they blog about it – ’sneezing’ his post further than his current readership.

Check out the number of blogs that link to his posts in Technorati. Most of them are just writing things that you’d normally expect to see being left as comments on a blog. It’s no wonder that he’s currently the 13th most linked to blog in the blogosphere (according to the Top 100 list)!

Sure, it seems really obvious now, doesn’t it?  Of course not everyone can pull that off, can they?

What about you?  Think turning off comments on your blog can help make it a bit more viral by forcing readers to comment outside of your blog?

(via Chris Brogan)

So, how does Alltop select sites for inclusion?

We use a patent-pending, semantic computational algorithm derived from the post-doctoral work of Guy at Stanford. Just kidding. We rely on several sources: results of Google searches, review of the sites’ and blogs’ content, researchers, and our “gut” plus the recommendations of the Twitter community, owners of the sites and blogs, and people who care enough to write to us. Let us declare something: The Twitter community has been the single biggest factor in the quality of Alltop. Without this group of mavens and connectors, Alltop would not be what it is today.

Alltop covers a variety of subjects, and lists some of the best resources on the web. Check them out.

1. On the main page I currently have excerpts from the 10 most recent posts.  Do you prefer the full text on the main page, just want to click through to posts that interest you?
2. What’s missing on ckwebb.com?  Why do you read?  How can I make this space a real resource for like-minded readers?
3. And finally, can anyone tell me why the hell this site still isn’t listed in Google’s index?

1. Can blog content be put right into a book? Should it?

I’m probably going to answer this one the long way around. With more than nearly 200,000 books published each year, getting a book noticed is becoming harder than ever. Publishers only have so much money and resources set aside for publicity and marketing, so increasingly we rely on author platform. In my opinion, a blog is the foundation for any author platform and therefore can provide a good basis for supporting a book.

Having said that, not every blog makes for a great book.

As a publisher, I am going to ask a few questions of my own before decide if a blog should be the basis for a book:

• How niche is the blog? Does it provide content that is unique? Niche is a good thing.
• What is the current readership of the blog? What is my built-in market?
• How active is the readership? Are they engaged – will they talk about your book?
• Is the blog part of a larger network – are there other blogs that can be leveraged for marketing and promotion?

Now to more directly answer the question about content – yes, I believe there are situations where blog content can be poured directly into a book. For certain types of blogs, having a more portable printed version makes a lot of sense. However, I don’t think that is necessarily the best model. (See question #3)

2. Are there rights issues? Legal issues between who owns what content?

The publisher is going to need to secure certain rights to help sell your book in a variety of channels and formats. As part of the contract, you warrant that the rights are yours to grant, so you had better be sure you actually own them. If you are a blogger for hire, or you write for someone else’s blog or blog network you may not own the rights to your work – so you may need to research your agreements to be sure.

In addition, if you publish your blog under certain Creative Commons licenses, you may not own the exclusive rights to your blog content. Seth Godin found this out the hard way when a publisher legally published a paper version of one of his ebooks.

If you plan to publish reader comments as part of your book, be sure you own the rights to those as well. IANAL, but this issue has come up with a book project recently and we felt the area was a bit to gray to include them as part of this blog-based book.

All of these situations can complicate the contract process, but your publisher should be willing to work with you to write a publishing agreement that secures the necessary rights to publish the book, while respecting the nature of the content on your blog. Often the answer lies in the publisher acquiring non-exclusive rights for content that is previously published on your blog.

In addition, be aware of other contract issues like the non-compete that may hamper your ability to continue blogging if they are not written properly.

3. Do publishers want to see unique content in a book, and if so, how much?

Yes, we do. And here is where I think the real value lies. My personal opinion is the best situation is to publish a book based on a blog – but to provide unique content in the book that you won’t find on the blog. That provides additional reasons for readers of your blog to buy the book.

However, books can get stale quickly, while your blog is alive. Tie the content of your book back to your blog to help minimize the stale factor. Make each a part of the other.

I hope these thoughts prove insightful and add to the discussion. I’d love to hear from more BlogHer attendees and prospective authors, so feel free to contact me.

Wiley colleague Jim Minatel also provides his thoughts on these questions.

Photo credit smiling_da_vinci

Every author should be blogging, and the interview includes several great tips every blogger should take advantage of.

One tasty morsel includes a link to some great SEO plugins for WordPress Ill be trying out later this week, and of particular interest was their thoughts on the social web as it pertains to SEO:

If you’re successful at building truly buzzworthy content, then you can try to use the social web to your advantage. It helps to know what you want to get out of the social web before you put a lot of effort into it: Are you going for pure branding? If so, set up a branded MySpace page or upload your logo-stamped videos to YouTube. Are you trying to be recognized as an expert on an techie topic? If so, seed your content into Digg. Are you trying to sell refurbished drill bits to manufacturing clients? Yeah… Web 2.0 probably shouldn’t be your highest priority.

Blogging should resume tomorrow and based on a quick scan of my Google Reader there is a lot to discus.

PS: (Strategery)

• There is now a central place to find and download WordPress plugins.
• You can get a much better idea about plugin quality and compatibility from the site.
• In the future you’ll be able to get notification inside of WordPress about plugins you use that have updates.

I continue to be impressed with the extendability and control afforded by Wordpress.  With such an active developer community, I have yet to be unable to find a plugin that provides some feature I am looking for.

If you have been a reader of my ExtremeTech blog, please update your links and make the switch to my new digs. I’ll still be talking about ExtremeTech books here, but decided to broaden the discussion a bit and felt a new blog was the best way to do it.

I’m hoping to have a real conversation with you, so please feel free to contact me, subscribe to the RSS feed, or add my blog to your favorite feed reader using the links in the sidebar. If you prefer, you can also get updates via email.