nektros - Cynicism in a Hot Dish

I enjoy watching new blogs die a slow, agonising death.

Since joining the so-and-so times interesting yet rarely often engaging enough to warrant a sphere branding-osphere two years ago, I have seen a multitude of very good and very bad blogs crash and burn in a manner comparable to throwing a match onto a gasoline-soaked tyre swing harbouring a newborn puppy and fastened to a branch overhanging a radioactive-powered shark-infested whirlpool.

Having myself once succumbed to the temptation of nudging updates on this site one notch lower on my priorities list – for a long time classing my blogging activities with such laudable pursuits as sending emails disguised as spam to random accounts just to see whether spammers are susceptible to being struck dead by concentrated wishful thoughts involving steamrollers and wrong right turns – I have often found myself on a new blog, perusing the peppy first few posts, when an invisible entity has seized me by the shoulders and shaken a mental image of tumbleweed with a bad case of heartburn into my blood-curdling screaming head.

Each case of this thought-provoking maelstrom has always brought me back to two fundamental questions: why do new blogs die so easily? And why is it so bloody entertaining to witness, calculating such odds as number of remaining posts before author will-to-write snappage occurs and so on, and all?

Of course, we all know the answer to the first question.

Lack of readers. Lack of comments. Lack of subscribers. Lack of ad click-throughs. Lack lack lack lack. Subscribing to that rhetoric, it’s hypothetically possible that a lack of private emails from readers praising oneself by utilising creative euphemisms along the lines of eating a banana or sucking dry a pomegranate is the bastard culprit in making at least one blogger pack up shop.

Forget lack. From my own experience, sites overflowing with positive attention and online eminence are just as vulnerable to good show folks but fuck it syndrome as newer blogs and blogs so new they could be comfortably described as prenatal are. Forget lack, and at least try to come up with an excuse for your aversion to writing able to be voiced without attracting several bunched fists into the more breakable parts of your jawbone.

Which brings me to a screeching halt to the novelty-store, candle-lit doorstop of the second question.

When was the last time you cast your eyes on the first few posts of a blog, only to be thrown backwards across the room onto your ass¹ by the sheer force of forced words flowing before your line of sight? Forced words being a one paragraph feature on such meaningful things as the exact shape, texture and colour profile of your pet iguana’s gallstones. Forced words being a one sentence overview of an event already disintegrated and meshed within the fabric of the blogosphere’s echo chamber. Forced words being a one word obituary of the latest deceased celebrity figure.

Forced words coupled with those sites most agreeable to providing them – otherwise known as prime tourist destinations for ad-copulation sight-seeing – provides at least one answer to the second question: “I am laughing maniacally at this blog’s future fading away into nothing because my own decision to abort my plans to create a cash-cow blog which would have somehow generated thousands of dollars in monthly ad revenue despite having content deserving of a peak reimbursement of several cannonballs being fired into my crotch one after the other is now justified”.

The rest, as usual, is attributable to either human nature, or the realisation that witnessing an online weblog’s self-implosion hardly approaches the unprecedented enjoyment levels derived from the limitless potential offered by a flamethrower and an abandoned chemical factory.

¹ Yes, I do mean literally.