The lesson seemed clear: create an authentic blog or don’t create a blog at all.

Wal-Mart employees began developing Check Out (subtitled “Where the Lanes Are All Open”) a year ago and recruited a handful of buyer-bloggers last fall, giving them rudimentary training on how to post their writing, upload videos and create hyperlinks.

The focus of the Web site, the novice bloggers decided, would be electronics, given the reliable appetite for gadget reviews and news on the Web, with a sprinkling of posts on the environment, toys and furniture.

After heeding the lessons of Wal-Mart’s earlier blogs and consulting with several well-known bloggers from sites like the Huffington Post, the buyers decided the site would succeed only if they wrote in their own voice, free from censorship and corporate review.

“Readers can tell if people are being genuine or monitored,” said Alex Cook, the merchandise manager for Wal-Mart’s entertainment division, who blogs about computers and electronics (and who wrote the lukewarm review of Windows Vista).

Anil Dash, a blogger at Six Apart, which makes blogging software, said the evolution in Wal-Mart’s thinking about blogs was typical. “You start with this total lockdown, suits read everything, one post a month model,” he said. “Then you evolve. A year later, you get one that is more open. A year after that, they start to do something that is far more authentic.”

Mr. Dash said Wal-Mart’s decision to let buyers do the blogging reflected a growing recognition that “trying to control who can speak and what they can say does not work.”

Mr. Agarwal said the company had no problems with any of the posts so far. “If you are a vendor and you talk to your Wal-Mart buyer all the time, you are going to know their likes and dislikes anyway,” he said.