In last Sunday's Observer, writer Nick Cohen was pretty harsh in his appraisal of the candidates for the Lulu Blooker Prize (for books based on blogs):
"I can't speak for the other judges, but to me, the supposedly radical medium of the future seemed as parasitic on traditional publishing as political bloggers are on traditional newspapers. We had the escapades of an American who moves to France, which was Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence redone for a US audience; Breakup Babe; a well-written piece of chick-lit whose author admitted her debt to Bridget Jones's Diary; and Monster Island, a seventh-rate horror novel, which ripped off every zombie movie ever made. (The author's only original touch was pitting his zombies against a fantasy army of assault-rifle-bearing, 14-year-old Somali schoolgirls.)"
He did find one gem: "And yet... buried underneath the dreadful and the derivative was a rough diamond: My War: Killing Time in Iraq by Colby Buzzell. It tells the reader what it's like to be a grunt fighting in the Sunni Triangle with more power and authority than the best embedded reporter in the world could manage. My War has been a cult hit in America - just before he died, Kurt Vonnegut sent Buzzell a fan letter - and it would never have been written if blogging had not been invented."
This was the most interesting part of Cohen's observations--namely that the very nature of blogging was responsible: "In theory, Buzzell could have kept a diary, gone home and turned it into a book. In practice, he wouldn't have had the self-confidence. His blog gave him strength because it attracted praise from hundreds of readers in the eight weeks before the authorities stopped him posting from a cyber cafe at the US base in Mosul. Their encouragement made him realise he could make it as an author."
