Classifying Literature and Blogs

This post is inspired by our fellow Team Stubb mates Victoria and Brittany (find their post here and here respectively). They both made great points in the debate on categorizing Moby Dick as a novel, and more generally speaking, the debate on making these types of classifications at all. Personally, I like the idea of having classifications for books. It sets up a basic framework for writers. Even if Moby Dick fits into many categories such as myth or allegory or epic, I would say overall it generally serves as a novel. That statement itself can be room for debate (one that would be better suited to discuss in the posts earlier mentioned); however, I want to focus on another question. If our current standards and classifications of literature are "flawed" and currently evolving to mixing genres, then when will it start including blog posts and other internet driven writing into such categories? Have these categories already been made?

I liked on the first day of class, Dr Burton posed this sort of idea: out of the best books we learn knowledge - now switch "books" to "blogs." Out of the best blogs we learn knowledge. Some of the class seemed to mentally repel that idea. Maybe that's just my imagination. Think about it, though. I've read blog posts, personal essays, and other pieces on the internet that, to me, were worth more merit than what I've suffered through studying Romantic era poetry. Yet authors from hundreds of years ago are considered literary geniuses. What of the authors today? What of the authors that aren't the professionals submitting items for publications and just posting them right on the internet for anyone to find?

I've been told by many professors that literature is work charged with meaning. If a simple blog post has just as much or more meaning than what Melville or Shakespeare or Austen have to say, do we get to log that into literary categories recognized as something important enough to call a novel or nonfiction or classic? Or does everything in the digital age get categorized as hopeful writers, nobody's, fanboys and fangirls putting whatever they want online?