Even Sarah Boxer, the editor of "Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web," contemplated a bit when an editor at Vintage Books pitched the idea of an anthology about blogs to her.

"It seemed a very hard thing to pull off," she says. "But I was intrigued. How do you find blogs? How would you go about putting together a book on blogs?"

And so, she figured it out. It took about a year of researching, following links, getting the lay of the virtual land. Along the way she created a standard: to make her list, the writing on the blog had to shine. And since the Web is immediate, fast and ever-changing, and books sit waiting to be visited, the blogs had to have a timelessness.

In the end Boxer chose 27 blogs from among the more than 15 million active blogs. "It's a skewed sample of what's out there," she says.

The mix is eclectic. There's some already famous ones such as the saucily named "Go Fug Yourself," a blog devoted to bashing celebrities' fashion choices. And "The Smoking Gun," an investigative site; it outed James "A Million Little Pieces" Frey and sent him to his Oprah lashing.

But there are more intimate choices too. Like "How to Learn Swedish in 1000 Difficult Lessons," (francisstrand.blogspot.com) by a 47-year-old American magazine editor living in Stockholm, who writes elegantly about his life, his husband, his travels. A sample: "Spain has such a peculiar pulse, fluttering and sluggish at the same time. Odd, that. If Spain were a person, she would be one of those types who rushes around the apartment madly cleaning, only to fall exhausted on the couch before jumping up to clean some more." Each post ends with a Swedish lesson.

And "It's Raining Noodles," (http://raining-noodles.blogspot.com) by a Singapore student who calls the blog her emotional piggy bank and herself a constructive pessimist -- she expects worst-case scenarios to happen, so the outcome will be either anticipated or pleasantly surprising.

Larry Pryor, an associate professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communications, believes the book is an essential tool.

"Many people are put off by blogs. It's a forest they don't want to enter," says Pryor, who studies the Web and blogging. "I can understand. It is kind of rough territory, boisterous and rough. But if you get some guidance on where to start, you can establish a road into it."

He's not kidding about roughness. Many of Boxer's choices contain less than family-friendly language and subject matter. But Boxer says it's the diaristic voice that bloggers use that can make their work singular.

David Rees, the voice behind "Get Your War On," (http://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/home.html), another Boxer choice, says the book makes sense to him too.

"There's a lot of good writing on the Internet, but it's nice to have it in book form, for those few minutes a day when I'm not on the Internet," he says.

Rees, who grew up in Chapel Hill, began his blog in the fall of 2001, in response to Operation: Enduring Freedom. It features cartoon strips made from public-domain clip art, and offers sometimes profane, often sharp criticism of the War on Terror.

Actually, Rees is redesigning his blog. "I'm changing my site to a blog so it's easier to update quickly, and because I'd like to comment on articles and news events as they happen. ... I think it'll be a mix of current events and other random cultural stuff (like most blogs)."

Despite being a former Web critic for The New York Times, and now a collector of blogs, Boxer (whose mother grew up in Raleigh, she adds) says she won't join the blogging fold.

"I think it takes a certain kind of extra nerve," she says. "I find it really scary."