The Economic times has written something on Blooking too. Frankly all these articles is getting quite old, repeating the same blooks over and over again, but its worth a look.

What’s more, many new businesses have sprung up to help scribes turn their blogs into books. Blogbasedbooks.com, specializing in blooks, has even set up an online shop for the same. On it’s homepage, they emphatically claim to “start a new trend that may one day overthrow the traditional publishing world!” and calling blooks or blog-based books “the equivalent of reality TV for the publishing world.”  

Now wouldn’t that be nice? 

Is there a market for blookworms? One day after the BusinessWeek news analysis of blooks, CNET has published an article on the blog debate the article has sparked off.

"These so called 75,000 new online diaries are not, by any stretch of the imagination mostly diaries. They are everything from diaries, to marketing channels, to sales channels, to small business models, to PR venues and more…Now, this extremely ridiculous label called ‘blook’ is trying to stick to the blogosphere (another outdated name) and keep the whole concept of mass communication via this platform in the realm of ‘tiddly-winks, thing-a-mabobs and watch-ya-macall-its’. Listen, not every new idea or process that results from this platform needs to start with ‘bl’. I don’t have a solution to this naming convention catastrophe, but, I do know that it’s not pretty." 

Huh. There’s a new way of getting published, and this blogger cries out at the naming convention. Pity indeed. He completely missed the point - the renewed interest in blooks. Perhaps its a breath of fresh air to support the traditional publishing agency. Perhaps its just a passing fad. Either way its a poor comment CNET added to their article, even if they’re trying to show the critics of the movement - but then i can think of so many other logical reasons as to why the blooking phenomenon can fail.

However, another blogger, Louise Marley, had a very good point.

"Am I being a dinosaur for feeling that this will mean even more stratification? 75,000 new online journals every day implies, to me, the old needle-in-a-haystack dilemma: many are called (or at least are hopeful) but damned few will be found. There are a few fascinating jewels that have come out of blogs, of course–though they seem mostly to deal with war and sex. Is there a market? Would the rest of you go in search of a blook?" 

It seems the world is waking up to the publishing posibilities of blooks. Businessweek Online ran an article on blooks yesterday, with a pretty spot-on summary of this greatly growing world of writing.

Colby Buzzell, 28, didn’t expect to end up writing a book. In 2004, he was on a yearlong tour of duty as a machine gunner in Iraq. The skateboarder and hard-rock fan from San Francisco would make a daily dash into the Army tent that housed an Internet café to share snippets of his life: listening to Metallica on his iPod, fellow soldiers surfing the Net for porn, the stress of the latest mission. After eight weeks, Buzzell’s online diary was discovered by his military superiors and the blogging endeavor came to an abrupt end. By then it was too late. Media outlets were quoting from the blog, and offers from publishers were trickling in.