The Blog Is Dying

No, it's not dying dying. But I think our best days may be behind us. We probably peaked right around late 2007/early 2008 with our Top 10 lists. Since then we have gradually lost our mojo. Yoggoth is finishing up law school and working part-time; he doesn't even leave comments anymore, let alone post. I'm not exactly sure what's happened to Zrbo since, the last I heard, he was still unemployed. And Ninquelote is busy creating other humans.

Well what about me, you ask? Let me tell you. In addition to not being able to surf the internet at my job, I am finding my low-budget short film acting career quite rewarding and time-consuming, and I am also writing a short story that is becoming longer and longer and may end up being a book. So I am becoming less and less concerned with lengthy blog inactivity. It's just a question of where best to place my energy in this crazy old world. The true moment of realization was last month. We'd only had nine posts for September. Normally I would have written one more post so that I could boost our September total to at least ten. But I decided not to do so. I decided ... to let it go. I'm still shaken up.

For a while we seemed to be gaining some serious traction. I assumed that our audience would simply expand and expand. But at some point last year it seemed to ... plateau. Quite how some of these other blogger sites gain a mass audience I can't really say. It certainly isn't their content; I remain quite proud of our high standards of witty repartee. Perhaps other bloggers put more energy into marketing. I was never really into that. "Marketing." Sounded like effort. Perhaps what's hurt us is that we're not specifically a "movie blog" or a "music blog" but rather a "whatever's on our minds and might make our friends laugh" blog. I have to say that if the shoe were on the other foot, I would probably not read this blog on a regular basis, because I am a very picky internet surfer. I might enjoy certain posts, sure, but would I remain a loyal reader of a blog with subject matter so diffuse? Yoggoth isn't even a loyal reader of the blog anymore and he's one of our bloggers!

Of course, this is cyberspace, and the blog does not need to go anywhere. Let us not forget the blog's original purpose, which was for Yoggoth and I to make our clever and insightful e-mail exchanges slightly more public and see what would happen. After only a month or so, I would say the enterprise surpassed our wildest expectations. I'd always walked around saying I was a writer, but suddenly, I sort of was! Smelling even a sliver of an audience, my ambition kicked in and I began putting some serious effort into my posts. Why not? I was sitting at a work and I had nothing else to do. Little Earl the blogger was, shall we say, overdue.

So the blog has certainly served its purpose, and it may well serve its purpose again someday, when I am allowed to surf the web at my job and I am not busy writing five other things first. I am just not going to worry about posting something every three days lest we "lose our audience." I mean, let's face it: we really worked our asses off on this thing. Look at our posting history. That's almost three years' worth of hardcore Cosmic American content right there. I always knew in the back of my mind that there was no way we could have kept that up forever. So a lull is in order. Nevertheless, every now and then, there will be that certain little internet link that I'll simply need to share with the world, or a rant that I know Zrbo will find irresistable. And Cosmic American Blog will be here.