Free republic is more an open exchange of information among all users. I have not found a format on ANY OTHER WEBSITE which is so usable, so convenient, as FR. The search abilities on here are amazing. All your posts are immediately retrievable. You can see posts in brief or full. The moderators ensure that anger and emotion do not dominate information exchange. Civility is maintained. Posters on FR encompass a mass of expertise and experience.
FR can contain blogs, in the sense of threads being pertinent to a single subject.
So, FR is far beyond a blog. In my experience, anything that happens, anywhere in the world, is documented here within moments. With unguilded truth. Way before the old media has time to carefully craft what they want opinion to be before they release information.
P.S. In search of information, I have been to many, many websites.
Very, very few allow input from the viewer(us).
On many, the website rarely changes. Info is static. On FR, new posts, new comments occur every moment.
Some websites contain excerpted posts from selected users for public consumption, but only registry allows reading them yourself.
FR registry is free, lurking requires no action at all, and one must only behave as a civil human being to keep from being ZOTTED.