Playground Rules in Pnom Penh

From our friend, Lise, who is soon to depart Cambodia. I think it speaks for itself.

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)