I left Salon last summer with the idea of working on a new book. I’m happy to report that the book now has a deal and a publisher — Crown, with whom I had such a happy experience on DREAMING IN CODE — and I’ll be spending the next year or so researching and writing it.

I am, I think the word is, stoked.

The topic will seem obvious to any of you who’ve been reading my stuff over the years: It’s going to be a book about bloggers and blogging. The working title is SAY EVERYTHING, and we’re describing it as the story of how blogging began, what it’s becoming, and what it means for our culture.

Upon delivering this news I typically hear two wildly divergent responses from two different groups of listeners. People in the tech world tend to react like this: “Blogging? Oh, that’s so 2000!” They think blogging is something that happened way back in the early part of this decade, about which everything has already been said. Meanwhile, people outside the tech-industry bubble — who’ve never heard of Techcrunch or Techmeme — respond with variations on “I’d love to read that.”

I should probably point out here that the population of potential readers in the second group outnumbers those in the former. Yet I belong to the first group myself. So I also hope to show the insiders that there is more to be learned and understood about blogging than they perhaps realize.

In other words, I’ll continue to do the sort of writing on technology I’ve always done, since I started back at the old S.F. Examiner: trying to be accurate enough to keep the respect of those immersed in the field, and insightful enough to hold their interest, while doing my best to make sure that everything I’ve written appeals to smart people who know nothing about the subject. It’s a bit of a straddle; some readers thought I pulled it off with DREAMING IN CODE, some thought I fell to one side or the other. I’m going to try it again.

Why blogging? I think I harbor a secret wish to spend the next couple of years explaining that writing a, you know, book about blogging is really okay — and that, no, I don’t think it should have been a blog instead.

Seriously, there’s a great tale that has still not been fully told of how the practice actually evolved — from technical invention to media craze to cultural phenomenon. As the haphazard efforts to mark some sort of 10th-anniversary-of-blogging this year proved, people are still a little fuzzy on the basics of the story. (Rebecca Blood’s account from 2000 remains invaluable, but it’s incomplete and now far out of date.)

When Mike Arrington asked, last summer, “Will Someone Who Actually Cares About Blogging Please Write the History Of It?,” I just smiled. But I wasn’t ready to talk about my plans yet; I remain uncharacteristically superstitious about announcing big projects until their financing is in place. I realize this is terrible un-Web-2.0ish of me, but there it is.

So there’s a story, one about how innovations emerge, how they bubble up from the creativity of geeks and pass into the wider culture. There’s also an argument, one that I’ve been making for ages, in different forms, from my very first column on blogging eight years ago: that blogging is not, despite what you hear from so many different quarters, a trivial phenomenon. And that, despite all the dismissals (most recently by Doris Lessing), blogging — far from contributing to the demise of culture and the end of civilization — actually offers a lifeline in the sea of information overload.

There’s much further to say but that’s enough for now. More as the work progresses!

I was deeply saddened to hear from my former colleagues at Salon that Bob Watts, who served as Salon’s art director for many years, passed away early this morning after a long fight with cancer. (Joan Walsh’s remembrance is here. And here are other remembrances from Salon people.)

I knew Bob from his start at Salon as a photo intern in 1998, but worked closest with him during the dark years after the dotcom bubble burst, when Salon’s prospects were dim and budgets were slim. Some of Salon’s editors fought their own guerrilla battles against our financial woes by spending money they didn’t really have, and it was my job as managing editor to try to reel them back toward reality. I never had to do that with Bob: at the end of each month he’d calmly deposit the art department’s report on my desk, and it was so reliably in order and under budget that, I confess, I took to reviewing it less and less closely over the years. It could simply be counted on, as could he.

Stereotypes paint the artist as undisciplined and indulgent. Bob wasn’t a stereotype; he was the real thing, and so he approached his work with care and consideration, balancing his own abundant inspiration with the needs of the people around him, working fast on ridiculously tight deadlines to create consistently delightful images.

He must have produced, literally, thousands of Salon cover images over the years, each one a witty or moving or beautiful little time capsule. I will miss them, as I will miss him.

It really has been a great year for Dreaming in Code — many thanks to all of you who helped make it so. The book started off with a rush of interest sparked by Joel Spolsky; I got to present the book to interested crowds at Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, and talk about it on a bunch of radio shows; and sales of the book held steady all year.

Now it’s the season of year-end lists, and my book has turned up on the Chicago Tribune’s list of “Our Favorite Books of 2007″. Some kind bloggers have also put it on their year-end lists — I’m grateful.

I’m also happy to have received a detailed and thoughtful write-up by Michael Schrage, the longtime technology columnist and commentator, who selected Dreaming for his list of favorite books of 2007 in Strategy and Business.

The paperback is due out in February, with a new epilogue, taking the Chandler story further down its still open road.

And, yes, there’s another book in the works where that one came from. I should be posting more about it pretty soon now…

Back in the dotcom era I used to appear occasionally on ZDTV’s “Silicon Spin” and chew on the tech headlines with John Dvorak and other guests. Dvorak is doing pretty much the same thing once more, in somewhat less lavish circumstances but with a somewhat more honest name for the show — Cranky Geeks.

I joined the panel today for a lively discussion about Facebook’s Beacon ad-policy brouhaha; the mysterious firing of a GameSpot editor, apparently for panning an advertiser’s game; Google’s entry into the wireless spectrum auction; AMD’s CEO bad-mouthing Intel (which really doesn’t qualify as news, does it?); and more.

You can stream or download the Cranky Geeks episode from this page.

If you tried to visit this blog over the last 48 hours or so, you may have experienced some, ah, bumps. (See previous post.)

I believe I’m back in business now, though I still have to put together some of the more far-flung pieces of the site.

Normal blogging will resume in a bit! Apologies for the brief mess.

I was all prepared to post a backlog of interesting stuff today when it came to my attention, thanks to alerts from Reinhard Handwerker and Vikram Thakur of Symantec, that some strange spammy stuff was happening on this site. I ended up spending the day rooting out bot droppings from my Wordpress installation.

Yes, it’s true, I’d been lax about upgrading to the latest version. I was only a little behind, but perhaps that was enough. In any case, here are some details, which might be useful to others who find themselves victim to what I think of as the “wordpress footer exploit.” (I’ve already gotten email from a couple of other users who are battling the same problem. Al Gore, apparently, went through something similar.)

Skip the rest of this unless you’re a Wordpress user in trouble looking for help!

Here were the gory details in my case. No doubt others will differ. I don’t have a clear sense of the starting point for the exploit — no doubt some little chink in the Wordpress armor that I can only hope is no longer open in the current version.

My HTML source revealed a long list of spammy links in the Wordpress footer — hidden from view but presumably accessible to the Googlebot. The first step in defeating them was to remove the php call to the wp_footer function from the footer template. (If you need that function for other plugins or users, you can add it back in once your code is cleaned up.)

That alone isn’t enough, alas. I also found 2-3 lines of code inserted into the main index.php file at the top level of the blog. The code that kept reinserting the spammy links into the footer even after they’d been deleted was located in a few lines added to the default-filters file in the wp-includes directory. Then I found two more completely new files had been added to wp-includes: one called “class-mail” and the other, deceptively simply named “apache.php,” which was a motherlode of mischief. (Thank you, though, oh hackers, for labeling your crud with ASCII art of a spider — it’s really helpful when one is scanning dozens of files to know that when you stumble on the malicious code, it comes with its very own Dark Mark.) “Classes.php” looked like it had been touched, too, based on the mod date; I replaced it with a clean version.

I killed all this crud and succeeded in removing the spammy links, but I still had a problem: there were a bunch of files that seemed to be being served from my domain that were just pages advertising, you know, those drugs that spammers like to advertise. They weren’t my content, of course, but they’d somehow made their way into my Wordpress — and they were being linked to from other compromised Wordpress sites. The ways of the botnets are devious indeed! I couldn’t figure out exactly where this infection’s root lay, but — having removed all the malicious code I could find and then changed all my passwords — I overwrote my Wordpress installation with a clean download of the Wordpress code, and that appeared to do the trick.

If you suspect your site is compromised, I recommend proceeding in the following order: First, root out the bad code; then change your passwords. If you change your passwords while your site is still compromised, you risk having your new passwords exposed via exactly the same route your old ones were, if in fact they were (I don’t know if mine were or not, but hey, when you start finding bad code in your directories, it’s time to change your passwords).

May you never need this information! But if you do need it, may this be of some use to you.

Apologies for the extended bout of blog hooky. My excuses are not all that profound. Mostly, I’ve been finishing up the new book proposal. Also, riding herd on a long-drawn-out basement remodeling project which should allow us, belatedly, to provide each of our now-eight-year-old boys with their own bedroom turf. (I think the term defensible turf is relevant here.)

And also, finally, I have been catching up with the rest of the known universe and plowing my way through the Harry Potter cycle. As a Tolkien cultist from youth, I’d long resisted, but the time finally came, and — while I remain a Tolkien man through-and-through — I freely admit to the addictive nature of J.K. Rowling’s books: she has created a worthier world than I’d expected from the Oxbridgian mimicry and the iconic images (impossibly cute round-spectacled kid face with robes and wand, etc.) that represent it on and beyond the covers of the books themselves.

This passage (from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) describing Dumbledore’s Pensieve caught my blog-enchanted eye. (Of course many others had previously noticed the same parallel.)

“What is it?” Harry asked shakily.

“This? It is called a Pensieve,” said Dumbledore. “I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind.”

“Er,” said Harry, who couldn’t truthfully say that he had ever felt anything of the sort.

“At these times,” said Dumbledore, indicating the stone basin, “I use the Pensieve. One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one’s mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one’s leisure. It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form.”

Easier to spot patterns and links, indeed!

I got my start in journalism-for-pay writing book reviews for the Village Voice and the Boston Phoenix. My editor at the Phoenix in those days (the early ’80s), Kit Rachlis, believed in giving young writers challenges — bless him. So one day I found myself staring at the forbidding 700-page mass of a new book by Norman Mailer titled Ancient Evenings — the celebrated novelist’s self-declared bid for literary immortality.

Somebody had to review it, and it really helped if that somebody didn’t have a day job.

The novel, set in ancient Egypt, is widely considered unreadable today — typically, by people who have not read it. And, to be honest, I don’t know if I’d have finished it had I not been paid to do so. But I was glad I did. The book, for all its mad excess, constituted a remarkable act of imaginative ambition — and even if Mailer only made good on a fraction of his self-dare, to see if he could get inside the world-view of a distant age, that was…something.

So — after immersing myself in Mailer’s voluminous body of work, reading his best, from The Naked and the Dead to Advertisements for Myself to Armies of the Night to The Executioner’s Song, along with a smattering of his not-best, of which there was plenty — I gave the book one of its few mixed reviews. And one day, in my infrequently-visited freelance writer’s mailbox, I found a little note from the author — thanking me, graciously, not for whatever praise I might have offered, but for what must have been my evident effort to approach the book on its own terms.

Now, on the one hand, for Mailer to have sent such a note violated what I, in my morally prescriptive youth, thought of as the impenetrable barricade that must always separate Artist from Critic. On the other hand, I was an aspiring little nobody just out of college, and he was Norman Mailer. I let pride win out over any sense of impropriety, and took the note as a rare sign of encouragement from the universe that my decision to set forth on the road of a writing career had not been entirely foolhardy.

At the moment of Mailer’s passing it’s worth remembering how much of his work centered on the moment of death. Ancient Evenings begins at the moment immediately following its narrator’s death, and its story is told from the perspective of this post-mortem residue, a “Ka” in the Egyptian nomenclature. “In the disorienting lightning flash of the book’s first page,” I wrote back in 1983, “the reader has no idea who the narrator is, but the narrator’s worse off — he has no idea what he is.”

Ancient Evenings also turns out to be a sequel to Mailer’s last big book. Another death-haunted story, full of musings about reincarnation, The Executioner’s Song built up slowly to full volume at Gary Gilmore’s execution, then dropped into silence. Ancient Evenings picks up at the very next moment. Although the two books’ material couldn’t be more different (one is a collation of the mundane, the other a heap of the spectacular), they’re both written in blunt, hard monosyllables that show the author off more humbly and impressively than the assertive baroque extravagance he used to employ. The sentences of Ancient Evenings are like blocks of stone heaved laboriously into place, and if the strain occasionally shows, the sight almost always elicits awe.

Here’s to Mailer’s Ka, wherever it may be.

I’ve been laying low this week completing a draft of a new book proposal. More on that as we get closer to the finish line. This is the first year I’ve not attended the Web 2.0 conference, but, you know, I need to focus — and I think I wasn’t that eager to hear Rupert Murdoch, anyway.

In the meantime, I’m happy to report that I have successfully managed to get Ecco Pro running on a Mac via Parallels. I actually achieved this goal a decade ago using Virtual PC, but boy was it slow! The Parallels set up, by contrast, is snappy and, so far, foolproof. Thanks to all of you who advised me on this dilemma. Very exciting. (The “coherence” mode of Parallels is remarkable — its puts the Windows taskbar and WinXP program windows on an equal footing on the Mac screen with the OSX stuff, turning your display into a sort of operating-system hermaphrodite.)

As I close in on my next book-project goal, I would also like to draw your attention to this quotation from William Gibson (in a Washington Post interview from last month), musing on the persistence of the book:

It’s the oldest and the first mass medium. And it’s the one that requires the most training to access. Novels, particularly, require serious cultural training. But it’s still the same thing — I make black marks on a white surface and someone else in another location looks at them and interprets them and sees a spaceship or whatever. It’s magic. It’s a magical thing. It’s very old magic, but it’s very thorough. The book is very well worked out, somewhat in the way that the wheel is very well worked out.

We arrived today in Estes Park, Colorado. We’re here at the YMCA of the Rockies because my wife’s company puts on a big yoga conference here every year. This is the first time we’ve all gone, including the kids. We walked out from dinner and were greeted by a trio of elk, just hanging out by the side of the road. The two big guys were locking horns and obviously engaged in some sort of vying-for-the-female ritual. They were all oblivious to the gathering crowd of human gawkers. They behaved as if they owned the place. Which in a way, of course, they do.