Don't feel you have what it takes to create a blog? Even if you lack the overwhelming urge to write, which is known in the psychological community as hypergraphia, almost anyone can write a blog post. The simple fact is that anyone can blog because everyone has something to say. The trick is putting pen to paper, or in the blogging world, keystrokes to screen!
Blogging, or what started out as “web logging,” began as a personal diary on the web. People kept personal diaries detailing their life on the “world wide web,” for everyone to read and to comment on. Bloggers seem to have this urge to share little tidbits of information they have, or thoughts they have. Sometimes blogging can be as therapeutic as complaining.
Alice Flaherty, a neuroscientist at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, wrote a book called “The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain” where she discusses blogging. She claims that complaining is a “placebo for getting satisfied” and that if you blog about stressful experiences that it could work the same as complaining.
But why the explosion of blogging? Actually, blogging started back in the early 1990s with a Swarthmore College student, Justin Hall, who is referred to as the “founding father of blogging.” according to information about him swirling around on the internet. He started writing about his life on the Internet and somehow, everyone decided they wanted to write about their life, too.
I have to admit, this is my first blog. When I was asked to write a blog, I first complained to myself and as days went by I worked myself into a lather and the whole blog thing created a stressful experience for me. Then I gave it some thought, and realized that a blog is really just a place on the web where you record your opinion of something—your thoughts, your ideas, your knowledge or lack thereof, or even your complaints! Well, even though I don’t suffer from hypergraphia, I too have opinions, thoughts, and complaints that I could write about on a daily basis. Don’t you? The problem is most people don’t think about or want to share that thought or that knowledge with the world, or at least with the “world wide web.” We would rather read other people’s thoughts, opinions, diaries, and knowledge, but we don’t want to put what we know or don’t know out there for the world to criticize it. Or do we?
There are so many millions of blogs on the Internet that no one can count how many blogs there are. Somewhere I read that at last count there were more than 150 million! But there is no accurate count, no record of how many millions of times someone decided to open their heart, share their stories, or tell us something interesting. There is no accurate count of written pages where we can peek into someone else’s life and then tell them what we think about it. No accurate account of hypergraphia, as I call it. But one thing I do know is blogging teaches you to recognize a few things about yourself. It makes you think about what you know, what you don’t know, what you like, what you don’t.
Do you have the overwhelming urge to write? If so, don’t stress, just blog. It might be just be your placebo for getting satisfied!
