Our blogger interview series continues today with one of the blogging titans of WIN, Brad Hill, currently piloting a dizzying array of our blogs including Digital Music, The Unofficial Google Weblog, The Unofficial Yahoo Weblog, Search Engine Marketing (still reading?), P2P and likely a few clandestine sites he's not telling us about. Without further ado...

What got you into blogging?

When I was a child, my grandmother used to stroke my hair and say, "This little boy could be president someday." Grandpa would retort, "Like hell. He'll be a blogger, or he'll be nothing." It's a damn shame Grandma was wrong, because if I were in office I would have fixed the American Idol voting system by now. But I digress. My first blog was a personal rumination on things, undistinguished and unread. Then I set up a topical blog to support a book I had written about digital music. That's where things stood for me when Weblogs, Inc. appeared on the scene.

What keeps you motivated to blog?

I am working toward the day when I can outsource all my blog writing to cheap providers in China and India. Besides that, I find blogging to be inherently motivating. Immediacy and editorial freedom are the two qualities of blogging that make the entire genre so dynamic for bloggers and their readers. If you groove on the pressure, have a deep background in some topic, and harbor a strong editorial agenda that needs expression, then blogging is almost as necessary as eating.

Burnout is unquestionably an issue for anyone who does this for the long haul. We have an advantage in the motivation game because WIN is a virtual office of gonzo bloggers, and we have a lot of communication going on. WIN is also a major publishing platform and we have millions of readers who spur us on. I guess my motivation is partly an inner urge to publish my own account of current events, and partly an impulse to feed the readers who make us what we are. You can regard blogging as a publishing genre or a community format. I see it as both, and am galvanized by both sides of the coin.

When did you start working with Weblogs, Inc.?

I knew of (but didn't meet) Jason Calacanis back in the day. I first heard of WIN in early 2004. By March I had gotten wind that Jason wanted to get some movement going in The Digital Music Weblog. I viewed WIN as a rocket being wheeled to the launch pad; I had no idea whether its engines would work, but I wanted to be on board for the ride. I wrote Jason. Self-effacing as always, I told him he'd be a fool to consider anyone else. A bit of time passed. Taking another tack, I suggested a Search Engine Marketing blog, since I had written a book about SEM as applied to Google. I don't recall the exact words of my letter, but I'm sure they conveyed the quarrelsome belligerence for which I am widely beloved. By whatever mysterious motivation, Jason brought me into the fold with two blogs: SEM and Digital Music. I quickly executed a competitive rampage by which I forcefully acquired other blogs, undermining those who stood in my way with potent subversion and outright sabotage. What I mean to say is that I yielded to felicitous strands of opportunity as they wafted on the winds of change, agreeing to help with certain blogs in the natural course of staff turnover. I am currently managing (and writing most of) our content related to digital music, Google, Yahoo!, SEM, RSS, and P2P. Who doesn't love acronyms? Acronyms are your friends.

How has it been working at WIN?

Unprecedented. And it's not just the unlimited use of the company jet. Many publishers declaim their partnerships with writers, but the rhetoric is emptied by working realities. WIN is all about partnership from its outer chocolate covering to its creamy caramel core. The writers here have always been given an insane amount of editorial control. In that regard the writer isn't even a partner--the writer is the boss. Business operations proceed with a transparency and openness to ideas that I have never witnessed in publishing.

Blogging here reminds me, in an oblique way, of my old CompuServe days of 1991-1995, when I owned and managed community forums in that service. The type of work is different, but the hurtling pace is similar. Now, as in those pre-Web and early-Web days, there is the sense that every morning can bring something new, wonderful, and unforeseen. That feeling charges the air in my daily documentation of Web 2.0 taking shape in the fields of music and search, and also regarding Weblogs, Inc. itself.

It turns out that the rocket engines do work, after all.

What do you do when you're not blogging?

I am one of the world's foremost alien abduction theorists, with a specialty in orifice probing. But let's save that avocation for another day.

When I'm sitting at my desk I'm always writing something. Books, columns, articles, blog entries, journalism, newsletters, and much other stuff have been pounded into my keyboards. I've written 19 first-edition consumer technology books, and many second- and third-edition updates. My topics, for the most part, have been music, Internet search, and online services.

• Most recently completed: Blogging For Dummies (out in January)
• Most recently published: Encyclopedia of American Classical Music
• Most recent deal: Third edition of my Complete Idiot's Guide to Playing the Piano, which has sold over 100,000 copies in its first two editions.

When I'm not at my desk, I try to be sitting at the piano. Practice time is my scarcest and most desired commodity.