[drupal-docs] New book about Drupal?

[Liza Sabater]

On Aug 09 2005, at 05:58, Jeremy Epstein wrote:

> a) be focused towards developers - they're much more likely to be
> interested in reading it than layman end-users;

Completely disagree.

Let me finish writing my notes about the BlogHer conference. If 
anything BlogHer shows there a lot of smart and sophisticated bloggers 
out there HUNGRY for technology like Drupal but they don't know it even 
exists. I am actually saddened that nobody from the community came to 
BlogHer to talk about Drupal or CivicSpace because, especially in my 
panel, the product would have been perfect as a topic of discussion.

One more thing : The two most successful blogging companies were 
co-founded by women. And these women focused on usability and 
flexibility. Blogger was bought by Google. SixApart is right now the 
biggest blogging company out there, with the capacity to have gobbled 
up LiveJournal and spawn poliglot versions of TypePad.

They are great tools for people coming into blogging but people like 
Dooce [ www.dooce.com ], for example, need Drupal to manage the 
communities that have evolved around them. She represents a whole group 
of bloggers "graduating" into blogging 2.0.

Heather told us during my panel that she closed comments and trackbacks 
because of the trolls and spam attacks she was having. She just could 
not manage the more than 500 comments a day coming at her. But she has 
a posse of devoted readers that could have managed trolls and kept 
house for her at Dooce.com if she had a tool like Drupal. And if she 
cranked it up a notch with the tools of CivicSpace, she could have 
"Dooced" maps of people connecting, networking. And this, just for what 
a lot of you would derisively call a "mommyblog" -- my thoughts about 
that are here http://www.culturekitchen.com/archives/003210.html

If you think Drupal is just for developers you have no understanding of 
the cultural revolution that blogging has wrought. That revolution was 
a metaphor in net art 10 years ago. What we are seeing here in 
conferences like BlogHer and online in places like DailyKos, is a 
cultural phenomenon agenced by the technology and changing how we are 
living and forming communities online and off.

My challenge to you as a developer is to take a step back and think of 
yourself as the guy chipping flints off a rock in the cave. Think of 
what that did to the development of humanity. You're the flint chipper, 
blogs the spearhead. Look how easy and transparent the development of 
that technology was. That's blogging 1.0. The question now is what does 
blogging 2.0 look lik. That's what Drupal is poised to be.

Making the book just for developers would be like sticking that spear 
in your own foot just because you can. Do you really want to hurt 
yourself and limp around while others are running away with this 
cultural revolution?

Best,
Liza Sabater

AIM - cultkitdiva
SKYPE - lizasabater