Today I speak with the founder of "omnivorous culture clearinghouse site Fimoculus and collectively created news-and-chat site MNSpeak" (as described by City Pages.) Inspired by his new list of Best Blogs That You Maybe Aren't Reading, I wanted to pick his brain a little bit on blogs and how they relate to writers.

From what you've observed, what makes for a good writing/writers blog?
First, let's itemize the negative cliches you hear about writers who try to blog: 1) their posts are too long, 2) they don't update frequently enough, and 3) they treat their blog as a publishing platform rather than an interactive medium.

I was going to debunk those myths, but it turns out they're all still true!

Okay, not always. There's a new generation of young writers schooled on how interactive media works -- those who understand blogging as participatory, anecdotal, and quirky. In the way that good writers are good readers, I suspect too many writers assume they will be good bloggers without first studying the craft.

Do you blog while on vacation? If not, what do you do for your blog when you have to be away from it? Guest bloggers? Just an away message?
I'm never really offline and I would never vacation someplace without internet access. In other words, I don't have a soul and you should never take my advice on blogging. (I once vacationed on Second Life. The locals are authentic, but the food sucks.)

But seriously, I had to shut down Fimoculous for a couple months last year while I produced a big site for NBC. I just put up a "out to lunch" sign and prayed the fickle public would not forgot me. Of course, they did. But if you have anything worthwhile to say, they'll eventually find you again -- and faster than you imagine.

What are your thoughts on blogs being turned into books?
I've got some great ideas for blooks. I want to start a blog/book about the Julia Child recipes that I cook. Oh, it's taken? Dammit. Okay, then I plan to write a blog/book where I scan in postcards that people send me. No way, really?

I suppose that's what I like about blog books: these projects might not have otherwise happened if it were not for the concept of blogging in the first place. I hope it's the beginning of a new form. (Perhaps there was once an epistolary novel about getting paid for anal sex with federal officials, but I doubt it was nearly as thrilling as the barely-fictionalized version.)

The worst offenders in the blog/book category are those writers who toss up a promotional blog about the book they just wrote. The blogosphere should be a filter for the publishing industry, and a blog should be the place an idea starts. If you can first prove to yourself and to an audience that it's a good idea, then maybe it deserves 300 pages.

The jury is out on how this new breed of wikibook will turn out, but right now I'm still waiting for someone to create an inventive blog+book hybrid that doesn't feel like a bad mashup.

Someone should really get Pynchon on this.

I've been running my personal site, Zulkey.com, since 2002. Sometimes I feel like I'm lagging behind what people are reading--I don't have a lot of photos, I'm struggling with trying to set up an RSS feed. From what you've seen, what have been some of the most elegant exits blogs that you've enjoyed have shut down?
I don't use an RSS reader, so maybe we're all behind the times in some way. Good blogging is really about developing a differentiating feature. Sometimes, that's simply good writing; other times, it's an application or a recurring feature. Blogs are miniature interactive publications that are in competition with millions of other miniature interactive publications. I don't like to crush people's hopes and dreams (unless I'm commenting on Gawker), but there is approximately one blog created every second, so you really need to think through what you hope to accomplish.

There are two kinds of blogs that I like, and they are paradoxically the exact opposite of each other: blogs that carve out an extreme niche ( History of the Button and Marmaduke Explained are my favorite recently examples) and blogs that are compulsive generalists ( Kottke and Snark Market are illustrative). In the last seven years of blogging history, hundreds of my favorite blogs have disappeared, but most of the people behind them have popped up elsewhere (like, say, this little site called NYTimes.com). Suck.com is the best example of this -- the mediascape is now littered with bylines from that defunct gem.

What do you project will be the ways that print magazines strive to produce online content that keeps up with the other gossipy, magazine-y blogs? Any portents for what this might mean for their contributors, or paid online writing in general? (Is there such a thing)?
I edited an internet culture magazine almost a decade ago, and we could never figure out how to create a decent print+internet hybrid. In the intervening years, I'm not sure anyone else has either. Is Radar really our best example?

I still subscribe to 15 magazines, and devour them like pancakes. And almost universally, their websites suck. But I sympathize with magazines -- they are in the peculiar position of protecting their birth right (measured editing, filtering) while being told to break out of anachronistic tendencies (timed publication, comprehensiveness).

As these new models develop, the fear for content creators is surely that they'll be subsumed by the crowd. This is what happened to professional photography -- the art became democratized. (The same could be said about nearly all parts of the culture industry: television writers, filmmakers, etc.) But technology never really terminates a culture; it just makes it more efficient. In my vision of the future, content creators have a marketplace where they bid on story ideas -- like an eBay for information creation. Editors dole out karma points on the quality of completed stories. The marketplace becomes more diverse, the public gets better information.

Someone should really blog it.