More Rickard, from a paper read before the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy in 1910. He was talking about the purpose of technical writing, but I think it has a more current application. Namely, it speaks volumes about the reasons many folks blog: to make meaning out of the stuff swirling around inside our heads*. It's not any single post that accomplishes this, but rather the process of distillation that occurs over months and years of blogging. Go back in your archives and dig around to see what you were doing a year or two ago, and then look at where you are now - what you're thinking, how you're writing. Most likely there's been progress.

The purpose of language is to convey ideas; the intent of technical writing is to transmit accurate information, whether as fact or theory, from one man to another, to the gain of all. Indeed the benefit is usually more to the giver than to the receiver. In the exchange of ideas, it is particularly true that it is more blessed to give than to receive. ... At the start the writer finds his knowledge as full of holes as a sieve, and his thought as turbid as the pulp from a stamp-mill. In the effort to convey information by writing he crystallizes the amorphous ideas collected during years of study and observation, he submits the confused notions of his brain to the settling process of logical thinking, whereby the true is precipitated from the false, the accurate decanted from the inaccurate, fact is filtered from supposition, and finally the solution of speech, pellucid but enriched, is outpoured generously.
The value of such a performance, either to the author or to his readers, depends upon the manner of it.

*It also reminds me that I need to be writing about my research and classwork here in between yammering on about plants and whatnot.