I never thought the day would come when someone would call me an SOB and I would smile with delight.

Certified Successful and Outstanding Blog At least, not until I made the acquaintance of web strategist, brand builder and corporate trainer extraordinaire, Liz Strauss.

Liz, who has a great skill in creative business thinking, had taken the commonly objectionable term “SOB” and used it as literally a badge of approval for Successful and Outstanding Blogs.

As well as being a creative and disruptive (in the best sense) thinker, Liz Strauss is also an exemplary encourager of other bloggers, so there are now many blogs which have been given the nod to carry the SOB badge.

Happily for me, this Thinking Home Business blog is one of them.

But there is more to Liz’s blog than just listing SOBs.

Her Successful and Outstanding Blog(gers) site is a rich source of fresh thinking and valuable information for anyone in business.

Recent posts include:

Influence: How to Persuade Anyone in Business to Do What You Want

7 Outstanding Web Tools to Organize 2011 and Get the Right Information to You – a guest post by Lior Levin

How to Make Quality the Signal Above the Time and Money Noise

Not before time, I have just added Liz’s blog to my Top Sites page here.

If you have a blog you would like to see endowed with the SOB badge, check out If You Want to be an SOB for the details of how to get Liz’s attention on that.

If I wrote a new book on business blogging, what would be a good list of topics?

It seems to me that with blogging, as with anything you’ve been doing for a sufficient length of time, it’s easy to fall into the way of thinking that some things are quite obvious, even though they weren’t obvious to you when you started.

The thought has been prompted by a few conversations lately, where I’ve been reminded that, although no one seems to look quizzically any more at the mention of blogs or blogging, for many people the purposes and practicalities of blogging, especially business blogging, are still not evident.

And there seems to be interest being expressed in actually blogging, by quite a few people who have up till now not shown such interest.

So much so that I’ve been thinking about doing a fresh book on the topic.

Like my e-book 7 Step Business Blog, a new book would be written for the (primarily) non-technical business owner who wants to get started and keep going, safely and productively.

A lot has changed since I wrote 7 Step Business Blog in 2005-06 – which is why I don’t sell the book any more, although it has been updated a couple of times and is now available free of charge for anyone interested in downloading it.

I’m thinking one of the key challenges for a new book will be in situating blogging appropriately within the broader framework of social media, which has evolved dramatically since I started writing that earlier book back in 2005.

My sense however is that some of the key challenges will be pretty closely aligned with the key challenges back in 2005.

Consider, for example, this list of topics which formed the agenda for the Blog Business Summit which according to my records was held in Seattle back in 2005:

Keynote Address: The Blog Advantage

Blog Business Models: What Strategies Make Money

Building Traffic: Posting isn’t Enough!

The Entrepreneurial Blog: Monetizing Your Interests

Picking a Platform: Blogging Engines Compared

True Voice: The Art and Science of Blog Writing

Good Blog Design: Speed, Accessibility, Transparency, and Clarity

Corporate Blogging: Strategy and Policy Marketing

Strategies and Tactics: PR and Beyond

Dealing with Bloggers: Partnering and Defense Strategies

Enhancing Internal Communications with Blogs, Wikis, and More

Media Blogging: Podcasting and Beyond

On the last item in the list, Media Blogging: Podcasting and Beyond, I find it a fascinating illustration of the speed of change that video, now so big, wasn’t deemed worthy at that time of even a mention in the list. The topic “Dealing with Bloggers: Partnering and Defense Strategies” would now have to be re-worked to relate to Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms.

And with the effective takeover by WordPress of at least the non-enterprise blogosphere, the discussion about blogging platforms would have to be different now.

But still an interesting list.

Assuming I go through with the idea of producing a new book on blogging, I’d love to hear suggestions from readers of this blog as to what to include in the book.

Please share your thoughts here in the Comments, or via the Contact page. I will appreciate that very much.