A Good Blog

The issue with defining the 'perfect' length, tone, or genre for a post is that the best blogs are characterized by their variety.  Pharyngula, for example, is an amazing online journal not because it follows a specific set of rules, but rather because of its diverse collection of articles, alternately professional, scholarly, scientific, or personal.  If there's any guideline for the posts, besides a common subject matter, it's the general quality of the writing and the consistent intelligence of it's author.  I don't mean to say that a great blog can't be a personal journal, but it has to be something more as well.  The best journal-type posts I have read come from Bagdad Burning, an online account of an Iraqi woman (pseudonym-ed River Bend) focusing on her experience during the Iraq war.  But even here there's a larger world view present, as River will frequently leave her own story to comment on the war in general, or on the lives of those around her.  In my own blogging career, which lasted from seventh to ninth grade, I wrote on a specific theme (that of atheism from a teenage perspective).  The blog, actually still active under kingdomofheathen.blogspot.com, was on all topics, but approached those topics from a very common place.  I think my personal success, at the blog's height about 200 page views daily, came from approaching a variety of topics in the same way.  And the success of these other blogs can be attributed to a similar source.