Better Blogging?

Surely offering guidelines and criteria of how a blog post should be written defies the very definition of blogging?

Blogging, as I have grown to understand it, is an individual experience in which opinions and experiences are articulated for a particular audience. The key words there are "individual," "opinion," and "experiences," as blogging cannot possibly follow some sort of structure. Essays and other academic endeavors follow a degree of structure and rigidity, however, blogging is meant to be an outlet of individualism and informal opinion. I cannot idly read articles from fellow bloggers that suggest that the way a large amount of people write is wrong.

Assuming that individuals write for other people's benefit is the first problem. That is, people do not necessarily write for other people, blogs are often treated as electronic journals. Personally, I write to articulate thoughts and opinions that have been on my mind -- I do not intend my writing on my blog to have the same characteristics as an informative comment in a respectable newspaper.

Blogging opens the experience of writing to the masses, which is a wonderful thought. Blogs allow for people to be open with their opinions, and it also allows people to express themselves however they see fit. As soon as police are assigned to blog posts limiting the prospect of individual opinion and expression, then surely the very spirit of blogging has been lost.

The statement "paper-writing produces papers while blogging produces writers" is very true, however, paper-writing and blogging are becoming dangerously similar thanks to internet theorists who believe in the standardization of expression and opinion. I cannot willfully endorse such criteria as it seems to me that they are wholly contradictory, and logically flawed.

Blogging should be about the message, not about the way in which the message is written.