A blog entry I haven't pre-written or edited. Here goes nothing. I've heard about how ProgressiveU started as a smaller community, and looking at the near-constant activity of the site now, I wonder what it was like in the yesteryears of Progressive U. Right now, we've recently begun the latest Blogging For Progress Scholarship Contest, so that means many new users and many new blogs popping up all over the place. Sometimes it's a little frustrating to wade through entry after entry, hardly finding anything worth reading completely. I always try to comment and/or rate the posts that I read, because I understand the appeal of receiving a rating or a comment. However, sometimes I can't think of anything nice to say. Sometimes the blog entries are that stupid or boring or that much a waste of my time. So I wonder what Progressive U (and the contest) was like years ago when the site began. There would have been fewer users, so...less competition. Now we have...jeez, I can' t even guess how many users. Blogs are being posted every couple minutes...or every couple seconds depending on who's on when. It feels like a little much. There is a "me against all of you" mentality that takes hold. I know there's so many people out there, so many better bloggers, that I wonder if too much competition can be a bad thing. Competition is supposed to encourage improvement (just look at competing companies prices, for example). But with this much competition...heck, I'll just say it: This is FastWeb.com all over again. Everyone knows about FastWeb. Everyone is getting info on the same scholarships, and the database is so widely used that scholarships are getting harder to obtain. You could put your heart and soul into an essay competition, only to be bested by some random person in South Carolina. Everyone who deserves an education deserves a chance at these opportunites, in my opinion. Maybe that's why it's can be frustrating to spend hours and hours each week on Progressive U to not even gain an honorable mention. But then, if you're lucky, you'll still have the spirit to plug on and continue. You'll keep trying. You'll relish the challenge. You become better for it. And you thought this entry would all be negative!