Why blog?

Why, indeed?
In August I will have been blogging for a year. As the time nears I think about whether I want to continue. If so, do I want to continue slogging away with Blogger or upgrade to a better (read paid) host?
More basic is the fundamental question: Why am I blogging at all?
Bene Diction points to a well-done article that asks Catholic bloggers why they blog.

...help Catholics to laugh a little when it seems that the world and Church is collapsing around them...a way that I can share with others my own experience of exploring the world...To blog is to first think that you have something worth saying. In my case I fall back on G.K. Chesterton when he said "if something's worth doing, it's worth doing badly." ...because it allows me to put my ideas out there, without having to submit them to the commercial structures imposed by conventional publishing....a way to continue my post-graduation education.

Catholic blogs are, as a rule, articulate and well-written. Does this have anything to do with the Sacrament of Reconcilliation? To go to confession, you have to clarify your thinking enough to use words, even if you're a basket case. As a child of mainstream Protestant roots I know about lugging around a boatload of unspeakable guilt, coupled with no established way to have a dialogue with anybody but peers.

Interesting read, with a string of links. I saw only one passing reference to Sept 11. We tend to forget, but that was THE formative moment for blogs. In the aftermath of that tragedy blogging exploded for two reasons. First, for the thousands of people who lived and worked in New York, whether or not they were at risk to be WTC victims, blogging was a way of telling the world that they were not killed. Second, at a deeper level, that signal event so deeply touched America that an upswelling of emotion was ripe for expression. Blogging was the right thing at the right time to help amiliorate that emotional pain, that angst.
After September 11, stopping blogging would be like trying to stop the birth of a baby. It was gonna happen. That, and a lot more.
I have been lately referring to my job as "my post-911" job.