I would say that your role depends on your purpose for creating the blog. If you are blogging to make money, your role will have to do with whatever will help you reach that goal. If you’re blogging just to share your thoughts with the world, that’s a different role.

In my case, I just started everydayseeker.com, which I’m hoping will become a place where conversation can develop based on spiritual principles. I am sharing my perspectives on these topics, while including teachings from spiritual texts. I would like to give people something to think about. I’m not sure what kind of role you would call that. I don’t like the idea of “teacher” (seems a little arrogant), and “facilitator” doesn’t quite fit it - maybe it’s somewhere in between.

Ranting is a big one for me.

By default, I am a high-strung emotional dude so I have several activities to combat this, one of which is blogging. My other stress relieving activities include chasing my kids around, meditation, martial arts, partying and video games.

The other major thing I believe I accomplish with blogging is to help spread awareness about various things I run across. And these things run the gamut from activism to technical problems.

Maybe our fundamental roles as bloggers will very according to our individual missions.

Some of us want to keep an online diary of feelings, opinions, suggestions, tools, and yes, humorous dialog.

There are bloggers who only want to drive traffic to their blog in order to turn a profit..not really having the desire for anything else accept to buy mama a new pair of shoes.

There are bloggers that want to express their thoughts for public viewing, in an effort to reach a reciprocating audience. Maybe to validate, discuss, or create an exchange of like-minds.

We blog for a multitude of reasons. But in the end, all of us share something in common.

Fundamentally, we want to be heard.

I think that the fundamental role as a blogger is understanding what your reader needs to know and answering those questions. On a personal blog a writer can rant on about any subject and the readers come or not. On a professional blog the fundamental role is to answer questions that the reader can not answer.
I have a colleague that writes about call centers and disaster recovery. Maybe not exciting subjects that everyone wants to know about, but he has a market. In fact his consulting fee on the subject is $500 an hour and he averages about 3 calls a month. $1500 a month for filling in the details about information that is more or less available on his blog.

Know what the client wants, and give it to them.

Hmm, provocative question.

I’ve done as so many people here have done and read lots of different blogs, for inspiration and education. I can honestly say there are probably almost as many reasons for getting into blogging as there are blogs.

Shouldn’t each blog have a unique position? As Kimberly says, we all blog for individual reasons and to have too narrow a definition of the purpose of a blog may be unduly restrictive.

Even when 3 different blogs say the same thing, you can normally see 4 different ways they’ve said it!