After almost 20 years of writing news stories and blogs about Apple, it’s become very clear to me that large media companies do not get blogging. This isn’t new, but it’s not changing either.

Setting up a section of your Web site and giving it a different name does not make you hip and cool. You don’t all of a sudden become a blogger one day because you call something a blog.

What these organizations don’t seem to realize is that a blog is more about attitude than the real estate it takes up on your servers.

A blog isn’t about the feelings of the company, but rather a personal look at the writer. You can’t assign a blogger a story and hope the audience doesn’t get the fact that they have no idea what they’re talking about or worse yet, they don’t really care.

Readers connect with a blogger. They know things about them, they laugh together and sometimes argue over points in a story. It’s a give and take relationship that not everyone can handle.

Blogging is not about being stiff and rigid in your writing, but being flexible and flowing with ideas. It doesn’t matter if everyone agrees with your thoughts. In fact, that would be really boring — but you write it anyway.

If large media companies want their writers to be bloggers, they need to let them go. Bloggers need to feel free to express themselves and their opinions. There are plenty of great bloggers on the Internet — many of them came from these large organizations, but weren’t allowed to post their thoughts.

Blogging is also about trust. If you’re readers know that you are writing from your heart, they will listen. They will engage you, and in the process you will learn something new. That, in turn, will help shape your opinions.

Blogging doesn’t have an agenda, other than expressing your true thoughts on a subject.