Bloggers: Does the tool you blog on even matter?

I don't think I have a broad enough readership to really get this question answered but I want to try it anyway because it's something I'm grappling with at work and... well I guess I want some validation.

The question is basically, how much control over the blog tool itself do bloggers really need? Is having control over the look and feel of your blog really important? Is integrating it into social networking tools important to you? Flickr plugins, Picasa Galleries, LibraryThing Widgets, Polls and Surveys, Link lists, Blogrolls, etc. Is the tool an important part of the act of blogging or is writing the only part of blogging that is important?

For me, the answer to that question is yes, absolutely, it does. The tool -- one's ability to configure, customize and run it -- is part-and-parcel of the act of blogging.

I will admit that I have been pretty happy on Blogger for the past 7 or 8 years running a personal web log, though I feel like it (Blogger) has lagged behind in its feature set compared with other blog platforms that more "professional" bloggers than I use to run their Personality Cults.

I have always felt that if I started doing this "for a living" that I would have to change tools to something like MoveableType or TypePad or Drupal. Either that, or I'd have to get much more serious about customizing my own template, which happens to be one of the reasons Blogger remains in the top tier of platforms: its ability to be customized quite thoroughly.

When you take away the opportunity to customize, integrate, be agile and responsive to your community (however large or small it may be) and become an expression of the blogger her or him self, you have turned bloggers into simple memoirists, reporters or editorialists. There's nothing wrong with those things at all -- they're all a type of writing which is indeed the heart and soul of blogging -- but blogging is quite a lot more than just writing. I've often said that "a blog is just a website" but in fact, while all blogs are websites, not all websites are blogs, which extrapolated tells me that I may in fact be justified in thinking that the medium matters -- the tool is a significant part of the act of blogging.

I'd love to hear your thoughts in email or in the comments for all to see.