Thursday, June 11, 2015

Book blogging in New Zealand

          11 June 2015- by Elizabeth Heritage via Booksellers NZ



As part of The Read’s ongoing exploration of book reviewing in Aotearoa, we now turn our attention to New Zealand book blogs.

First, how is a blog defined? The NZ Oxford Dictionary defines the word "blog" as a shortened version of weblog, “a personal website, on which an individual or group of users records their experiences and opinions, links to other sites, etc., on a regular basis.” Wikipedia expands on this: “More recently multi-author blogs (MABs) have developed, with posts written by large numbers of authors and professionally edited … A majority are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments, and it is this interactivity that distinguishes blogs from other, static websites. Many blogs provide commentary on a particular subject; some function as more personal online diaries; others function more as online brand advertising of a particular individual or company.”
For this article I spoke to writers of many different kinds of blogs: some written independently, some written as part of a person’s employment; some with commissioned content from others (paid and unpaid), some written entirely by one author; some featuring formal essays, creative writing and professional criticism, some devoted to casual chatter; all of them driven by a love of books and a desire to contribute to the cultural conversation.

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