Blogging.

Yes that's right, I'm blogging about blogging. I'm...metablogging.

Scrolling through my facebook news feed, I've noticed that an increasing amount of my facebook "friends" have started blogging, either though inadvertent creeping because facebook gives tells me what people write on each others' walls or because they post links to their blog posts.

Since when has blogging become so popular? I know it's been a "cool" thing to do for awhile, but it seems like now that everybody does it, it's much less cool.

Why do so many of us feel the need to tell the internet about every detail of our lives? Is it because no one in real life cares? Do we really think that what we have to say is that important? Are we really contributing to society by posting all this stuff online?

I'm completely guilty of this. I started this blog about a year and a half ago, and when I first started, I didn't know anybody else who blogged. I don't think I'd ever even read a blog before. I started blogging because I was going through my freshman year at college and I wanted people to read it and learn how to survive college themselves or something like that. I thought that I had this wonderful, unique perspective and experience and that this experience made me some kind of an expert.

Do you know how many people in the United States are in college right now? According to the U.S. 2009 census report on school enrollment, about 14 million people are enrolled in some type of post-high school education, with about 2 million of those being first year students at a 4-year college, aka college freshmen. Definitely NOT a unique experience.

People have blogs about things like vegetarian cooking, fixing up a home, raising a family, traveling, running a marathon, photography, any number of things, but ultimately blogging boils down to people publishing things about their life on the internet. I do it too, but why? Why do we feel the need for people to read our every thought and daily agenda?

We have such an overload of information sharing: Facebook, Twitter, blogging, and now you can even find out where your friends are with sites like Foursquare. Remember when facebook status updates were just that, status updates? It literally said "Cara is...." and you would fill in "happy" or "tired" or "excited for the weekend." Now they've dropped the "is" and it's become basically like posting on your own wall. You can write as much as you want about whatever you want. It's like one big online demand for attention.

I post my newest blogs to my facebook page so people will see them and read them. I monitor my blog stats to see how many people view each page and how many views I've gotten. Why do I care? I don't know. It makes me feel accomplished or something?

And see the weird part is, I never used to care who read this. I didn't publish it to facebook or "follow" any other blogs and I didn't care about getting hits. I've always loved writing, so blogging was a perfect outlet. I still love writing and I'm not gonna lie, I like blogging. I like knowing that other people like what I write. I want to be entertaining.

So is that why the blog community exists? Because we gain satisfaction from other people caring about what we write? Probably.