Mark Frauenfelder, he of BoingBoing, has written what I consider to be the most indispensable books I’ve purchased in a long time.  Rule the Web: How to Do Anything and Everything on the Internet — Better, Faster, Easier is the book I’ve often dreamed of writing, a practical guide to all the useful stuff online.  I can hear you saying, "How useful can a book about the web be?  Won’t it be out of date by the time you get it?"  I’d probably have agreed with you in the past, but having been an avid reader of BoingBoing for years I had confidence that this would be a worthwhile buy and upon skimming through it this week I can tell you it’s a great resource.  A couple of points:

• Obviously the book will be dated in the not-too-distant future, but that just means I can look forward to updated editions. In the interim there’s a companion website, ruletheweb.net, that provides updates, corrections, video, etc.  Awesome!
• Amazingly this book references Twitter which became all the rage with web geeks just a couple of months ago.  That just blows my mind.
• Chapters include:
  1. Creating and Sharing
  2. Searching and Browsing
  3. Shopping and Selling
  4. Health, Exercise and Sports
  5. Media and Entertainment
  6. Travel and Sightseeing
  7. Work, Organization and Productivity
  8. Communication
  9. Toolbox
  10. Protecting and Maintaining
  11. Tips from My Favorite Bloggers
• I love how within the chapters there are sub-categories and then within those Frauenfelder utilizes a Q&A format to address specific issues.  My favorite example so far is in the first chapter, Creating & Sharing, under the sub-category of "Photography and Video."  The question is "What’s the best way to share and store my videos online?"  Frauenfelder doesn’t like YouTube because of the poor video quality so he recommends signing up for a free blogging account at Vox.com and hosting your video there.   Each video can be up to 50 MB (compared to 10 MB for YouTube) which allows you to share much higher video quality.  FYI, Vox is a Six Apart product as is TypePad which is what I use for this blog so I’m kind of embarassed that I didn’t already know this.  For video files greater than 50 MB he recommends Internet Archive, but he points out the catch that you can’t copyright anything hosted there.  Fec and I were talking just last week about the lousy video hosting choices out there and then, "Voila!" I come across this great tip. 

I’m telling you, if you spend any amount of time online this is a GREAT resource.