I've been thinking a lot for the past couple of days about blogging; how it's done, how it was done, how it should be done, and how it will be done. This was probably an escape my mind came up with to be able to ignore the fact that I've consistently failed at anything remotely resembling academic responsibility this week, failing to show up for classes and work on a frightening schedule (1/2 the week thus far, gulp). That's an interesting idea that should be pursued some more; hiding in things we're good at to escape things we're bad at. Learned helplessness much?

But back to blogging. I am convinced, largely thanks to Say Everything by Scott Rosenberg, that links are the end-all-be-all of blogging. Comments are silly; links are how conversations happen. Tumblr came close with its reblog concept, but limited itself to just the Tumblr community. That, my friends, is what we in the industry call a "circlejerk".

So, like everything that annoys me, I'm considering whether or not I should set out on a quest to fix it. Make a Wordpress/Tumblr-esque service/open-source software combination that will follow this links-are-king paradigm. Ignoring everything else I have already taken on, this is a daunting project. And yet, I'm the proud new owner of tangl.es, because our links are the tangled web we weave.

Yes, I'm a little insane.

I picked up a new book about a week ago when my ex-boyfriend was visiting me (that weird occurrence seems to be a common one, for us) called "say everything" by Scott Rosenberg. It's just a story of how blogging began, and it is actually a rather fascinating read. I recommend it.

But I'm sitting here tonight, in a rather glum mood (sleeping for 24 hours straight seems to bring those on), mulling over that ex-boyfriend I mentioned. And I have to ask myself: why do we feel the need to say everything? Why does the human psyche give such a damn about being heard?

I don't really have an answer, but I do have a guess: It's therapeutic. That's the long and the short of it. Saying everything is a therapeutic endeavour that we all should try at one point or another. It doesn't even matter if anyone's listening, as long as we believe they're listening. This is what blogging, then Facebook Status Updates, and now Twitter is all about. (On a side-note, I'm being blessed with people who are listening because I have a kick-ass group of Twitter followers.)

I think that, from the time when we were keeping diaries, we have had trouble knowing ourselves. We have no idea how we sound, we forget what used to be important to us, and we cannot seem to get an outside view of ourselves. Writing things down helped that; we could recall that, at one point, the pants we wore to a party was more important to us than who went to the party. We could view something we wrote a month ago, and realise we were kind of an asshole. We could (maybe) consider whether we were still an asshole. For once, we could step outside our bodies and really get to know ourselves.

I think, over time, we've been developing simpler and simpler ways to do this, and simpler and simpler ways to share it. The act of making it simpler to do makes sense to me, and seems in line with the therapeutic self-improvement the form is meant to accomplish. But the sharing? I'm having trouble deciding why it's so important to people to easily share their thoughts, ideas, feelings, and things that should leave them feeling vulnerable with the world. Why did I challenge myself, not to write every single day, but to make a blog post every day? I can't answer for anyone but me.

I have a history of starting things and never finishing them. A terrible practice I try to get out of at every opportunity. One of the tricks I've learned, over the past few years, is that getting other people involved shames me into doing things. I'm ashamed of myself when I miss a post here. I'm ashamed of myself when I haven't made enough progress on a project other people are working towards. So I think, by sharing our innermost selves with the world, we're pushing ourselves to share more, engage in this therapy more. Writing is work, and even if it's good for us, we still need to get motivation to do it.

Why do you share?