Amitabh Bac­chan blogs. Abhi­nav Bindra blogs. Omar Abdul­lah used to blog. I blog.

Most prob­a­bly, you blog.

We all have our own lives (well, mostly). We all have loads to do (again — most of us). Why do we blog? Is it really so good to express our thoughts, views, opin­ions — even our lives — to com­plete strangers and some friends? Does the fact that we have a medium to express our­selves mean that it must be used?

Blog­ging is a lot like other mass-communication media but in one cru­cial way, it is com­pletely dif­fer­ent. There is no edi­tor; no restric­tion. Write what you like, when you like, if you like — just write. Is it that sur­pris­ing that search­ing — or rather, googling — for “rant” + “blog” returns 491,000 results? That I have my own “Rant” cat­e­gory — which is also, sur­pris­ingly enough, the one most often used? [That was pure, unadul­ter­ated sar­casm, incase you didn’t notice.]

Blog­ging seems to have many, many uses — spread­ing information/knowledge, set­ting up your own, eas­ily edited web-page with­out much tech­ni­cal know-how, show­ing off your pic­tures, rav­ing against peo­ple you don’t like. Every­thing and any­thing. You have video blogs, pic­ture blogs, news blogs, blog blogs… Name it and you can find it. This also means that blogs are amongst the most heav­ily abused media too; there is no such thing as qual­ity con­trol — no need for ref­er­ences, “being cor­rect”. No Wikipedia labels mark­ing the entry/page as “This arti­cle doesn’t cite it’s sources.”.

All this has been debated on — heav­ily. On news net­works, in news­pa­pers, web­sites, and — yes, of course — blogs.

What I’ve never really found an arti­cle on is why do we blog? Earn­ing through adver­tise­ments? Gain­ing the prover­bial fif­teen min­utes of fame over the net? As a means of cathar­sis — anony­mously shar­ing our most inti­mate thoughts and expe­ri­ences with com­plete strangers? Learn­ing what oth­ers think with­out reper­cus­sions? Per­haps all of these. Maybe none.

My own rea­sons for blog­ging are var­ied: as a means of express­ing myself; see­ing if any­one else thinks as I do; announc­ing some­thing impor­tant in my life; shar­ing tech­ni­cal knowl­edge with oth­ers — as oth­ers have shared with me; sim­ply hav­ing my own, clearly defined — and vis­i­ble — vir­tual exis­tence. A way to con­nect with many more peo­ple than I can phys­i­cally — across coun­tries, con­tin­tents and oceans.

If you’re read­ing this blog, and have a blog of your own, answer this: Why do you blog?

I can­not answer that ques­tion for every­one. Per­haps it would be like ask­ing an author — why do you write? Or an artist — why do you paint? Why do you cre­ate? My favourite answer for this ques­tion comes from Thomas Berger — Because it isn’t there.