This Blog Is Dead
Well, not really. I’m probably gonna keep writing here until someone pays me to stop, because I like writing and ranting. But this blog is dead from a monetary perspective. These words will never make me money, because my blog is not a niche blog. I don’t focus on one thing alone. Sure most of my posts involve television in one way or another, but I don’t limit my words.
And niche blogs are the only kind that can last in this new web, where there are literally hundreds of thousands of blogs out there, with a large majority of them being useless chatter about whatever’s on the author’s mind. That is, just like mine. So I’m a drop in an ocean. The sheer density of the blogosphere makes it nigh impossible for a blog that doesn’t have very frequent very insightful very narrowly focused content to be seen amid the detritus.
But, as the little subheading of my blog says, everything matters. I could very easily devote this blog to television, or to science fiction, or to science fiction television, or to mid-90′s science fiction television, or to any number of painfully constructed microverses, but I’d rather do my own thing.
One factor that comes into play is my generally lackluster writing capabilities. I don’t consider myself a bad writer, and on certain days I might even be a good writer, but it takes more than that to be noticed. For every well-written insightful niche blog there are dozens more that write about the same things but with less clarity and fewer readers. So, in my particular case, the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t problems inherent in my unexceptional prose also decrease my incentive to overspecialize.
But there’s more than just that pragmatic urge at work when I make the active decision to write broadly1. Good storytelling does more than focus. While my material on this blog is primarily “non-fiction” I generally draw my writing inspirations from the world of fiction. The best television shows out there are the best because, aside from creating a compelling foreground, the effort exerted on the background reifies that world.
And while I’m not creating a world, I am defining a world: the world as I see it. If this blog were focused on one thing in particular, you would know that that one thing is important to me, but that’s all you’d know. And I don’t think that’s enough. I think that to find my stance on anything to be of value, you need more than just that stance. You need to see the words written here as coming from a person, to judge them beyond their surface structure. It needs to come from a living person. So this blog is dead, but I am very much alive2.