Why does one blog??

Is it a fashion statement? Or is it just to show you are cool? Lets see..

You think you are intelligent, so how do you show your 'talent' to others...hmm....bragging is of course no good and you know what darned consequences can come up, so its very risky. You can try writing articles in newspaper and believe me if you are able to get them published, you should be a good writer but since here we are talking bout mediocre-writer but supposedly 'self-esteemed' mob, all of them are not going to make it that far. So this group of people find new vents to let out their 'I am good' fumes.
Long back, poeple used to write diaries, chronicles, journals and what not. Thankfully, the stuff was personal and not many were tortured by asked to read those. But then, this did not help the creative writers - they didn't want to hide their talent. So, this form though popular was restricted to shy-writers only.

Few years back, the not-so-shy writers started emailing weird stuff to their friends, emails like 'Have you ever thought...', 'Why God exists', 'Is India going in right direction', 'the power of youth; are we delivering', 'shame on govt...' blah blah or even self-written poems at times(yes yes poem only, rhyme or no rhyme, who cares right??). Poor friends who are forced to read them sometime and then even tell their author-friend, "wow, that was good"! well, that trend was continuing slowly and steadily until John Barger came up with the term 'weblog' in 1997 and then finally Mr. Peter Merholz coined the short-form 'blog'. The website Xanga started with it officially for the first time and since then my dear reader, the bloggers haven't stopped!
Now they had the perfect tool to scribble their weirdest and dumbest of ideas, opinions and everything and proudly call it BLOG. Websites like Blogger took it to a new height and added features like 'email alerts to friends'. I hope you are already familiar with it though I haven't yet enabled it with your id :)

So, I guess this was one aspect of how and why blogging started. Another view might be more 'psychological'. Lets see... :)

One doesn't talk too much but ideas are piling up high in his/her small mind...so what to do? He's not very comfortable discussing them verbally with friends or strangers or whoever, so he decides to blog them out. It starts with almost nil passion, he posts one blog then forgets to even check it back, sometime even forgets the login to the blog-site and eventually throws the idea out. Then thanks to the email alerts or his enthusiastic friends who keep sending their bloggin links again n again. So this guy gets all geared-up...'why can't I do it', 'yes, I will', 'I can torture too' and there goes one more restless, pestering writer added to the bloggers!

well, this story is sounding too familiar to me, I shall end now :)