Way back in 2004, when I started EiNY, blogging was still fairly new and, dare I say it, revolutionary. It was credited with bringing down a US senator, forcing the resignation of Dan Rather and giving a voice to the voiceless. Basically, It occupied the place that Twitter does today.

So where does that leave blogging? According to the Guardian’s Technology editor Charles Arthur, the long tail of blogging is dying:

NetNewsWire, my RSS feed reader, has nearly 500 feeds. When one of them hasn’t been updated for 60 days, it turns brown, like a plant dying for lack of water. More and more of the feeds I follow are turning brown.

The cause of death for many blogs, according to Arthur, is the growing number of alternatives for sharing information on the Web, particularly Facebook and Twitter, which have drawn large numbers of blog readers away and possibly persuaded many bloggers to quit. As he says, it’s a lot easier to write a tweet or to post something to somebody’s Facebook wall than it is to create a post like this one. Right now, Sofie is sitting in another room reading a book. If I had tweeted Arthur’s article, I’d be sitting next to her.

Over the past year, I have lost count of how many times I have come close to putting this blog to sleep. My online life has become so fragmented that it is almost unmanageable. I am a blog. I am a Facebook profile. I am a Twitter account. And as my publishing channels become more disparate, it becomes harder and harder to know what to publish where—and since so much is lost to the increasing noise of competing Twitter feeds and Facebook updates, whether to bother at all.

If I tweet an interesting story, like this moving and expertly-written piece that appeared in the New York Times at the weekend, I know my parents won’t see it. Yet it seems pointless to post an excerpt on this blog when I can just tweet it and move on. Likewise, some of the photos that would have given me so much pleasure to share on this blog are now reserved for Facebook. And with the acquisition of a shiny new iPhone last week, I suspect that future photos will increasingly appear on Twitpic.

Blogging might have been a questionable exercise in the first half of the naughties. But at least it was a repository for everything. Nowadays, you can’t possibly follow all of the information that even one person throws at you. It’s enough to make me want to give up completely. On the other hand, I remember that when I first started blogging, the main question everybody asked was, what’s the point? But now that almost all my friends have Facebook accounts and Twitter feeds they are all, in a sense, bloggers too.

This new music video from Luke Jackson brings back a few memories of gray skies, brick walls, damp earth, and slouching home to Hackney at sunrise. Since Luke now lives in Toronto, I wonder whether he sometimes misses it too?

Slovenian Jazz choir Perpetuum Jazzille simulates a rain storm with their hands. (Brought to you on YouTube on a blog via Twitter. Don’t you just love the Internet!)

Much (perhaps, too much?) has been made of Twitter’s role in the Iranian protests. But what about the BBC’s Persian-language service? According to an anonymous correspondent for The New Yorker, the channel has been an invaluable source of information, when it’s not being jammed:

In the course of the afternoon, contact gets harder. The cell-phone networks seize up and the Internet performs even more sluggishly than usual, while the government tries to jam all foreign TV stations—in particular, the BBC’s Persian-language channel. This channel, beaming images and reports sent by normal Iranian citizens back into the country, has been hugely influential in spreading news of the protests to Iranians who would otherwise have relied on state television or the inferior American-based Persian-language channels.

Letter From Tehran: With The Marchers (TNY)

The Noahides, or B’nei Noach, are non-Jews who follow the seven laws of Noah. My friend Ben Harris has just filed a very interesting video report about a community of Noahides in Tennessee.

Noahides 2.0: Internet fuels non-Jewish interest in the Seven Laws of Noah (JTA)

Me: Is this the buildings department?
311: Yes.
Me: There is a tree in an abandoned building behind our apartment and it looks like it is about to fall over.

311: A crate?
Me: A tree.
311: You say there’s a crate about to fall over?
Me: No, a tree? T-R-E-E.
311: A crane?
Me: No, a TREE. A big thing with leaves and branches.
311: Oh, a tree.
Me: Yes!
311: Is it a city tree?
Me: No, it’s in the backyard of a derelict building.

The 311 operator pauses and then begins to read from her screen.

311: If the tree is not a city tree and branches need to be removed, residents should call a landscaping company…
Me: No, you don’t understand. The tree is not on my property. It’s on a neighbor’s property.
311: Oh.
Me: The building has been boarded up so I assume the city already knows about it.
311: Hm.
Me: And it looks like the tree could fall over any minute.
311: …
Me: I think someone needs to come out as soon as possible.
311: …

Me: There are lots of kids who play down there.
311: Kids?
Me: Yes, it’s very popular with children. Both in our garden and our neighbor’s garden.
311: The tree is in your neighbor’s garden?
Me: The tree is in the garden of a derelict house behind our building. But the tree could fall in our garden or our neighbors’ next door.
311: Oh, well, we might be able to do something…

The 311 operator takes the tree’s details.

311: Your request has been logged and will be processed in the next five days.
Me: Don’t you think that, considering the tree could fall at any time, you ought to send someone sooner than five days?
311: Oh, they will.
Me: But you just told me five days.
311: Yes, but they will get this message today and when they see what I have said about the kids playing outside I am sure they will come out straight away.

That was a few hours ago. I am not holding my breath.

In March, 2005, the New York Times Magazine ran a lengthy piece about billionaire Tim Blixseth’s plans to create the world’s most exclusive international resort, Yellowstone Club World.

Headlined Club Med for Multimillionaires, the article detailed how Blixseth had gone on a shopping spree for extravagant properties: a private golf club in Scotland, a 14th-century chateau near Paris, a stretch of Pacific coastline in Mexico.

Blixseth financed this dream by borrowing heavily against his biggest asset, the Yellowstone Club, a private ski resort, in Montana, that counts Bill Gates among its 300-or-so ultra affluent members.

Yesterday, the Times business section ran an exhaustive piece detailing how his plan unraveled, leaving Blixseth’s former wife, Edra, with a bill for hundreds of millions of dollars and bankrupting the club.

It’s a fascinating piece, not least because of the light it shines on one of the world’s most exclusive resorts, not to mention the Blixseth’s messy relationship:

Mr. Blixseth declined repeated interview requests. But in documents filed in the Montana bankruptcy court last Thursday, he describes Ms. Blixseth as someone who “spent millions like money grew on trees” and accuses her of being involved in “a pattern of untruthfulness and dishonest tactics.”

Among examples of profligate spending Mr. Blixseth cites in the filing is a $90,000 party that Ms. Blixseth had at Porcupine Creek for more than 100 guests. Guests were invited to whack piñatas shaped like Mr. Blixseth and which contained chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil. Voodoo dolls resembling Mr. Blixseth — complete with stickpins — were also on display. (Ms. Blixseth acknowledges that the party did indeed occur.)

The Yellowstone Club, valued at $400 million a year or so ago, was sold recently for $115 million.

According to the letters page of the UAE’s The National, Scrabble tournaments in the Gulf have become a little too competitive of late:

To clarify the rules of the Gulf Scrabble Tournament referred to in the editorial Strong Words (June 7), following last year’s tile picking controversy, this year the Gulf tournament organisers were very stringent on how tiles were drawn before each turn.

The tile bag should be held at eye level, the player’s head turned away, tiles drawn preferably one by one (no counting tiles while the hand is in the bag), and placed face down on the table.

Another interesting rule that was reiterated was the “hold” rule, where a player can ask an opponent to wait before drawing new tiles after his turn to prevent unscrupulous players from “fast bagging” – ie, playing a phoney word (often deliberately), then drawing tiles (which validates the move) without giving their opponent a chance to assess the move and challenge the legitimacy of the word.

As one former Gulf player remarked following last year’s controversy: “Scrabble has lost its innocence.”

Competitors may want to keep an eye on their Gulf Team opponents at the World Scrabble Championships in Malaysia, this fall.