Jacques Rene Zammit's blog is seven years old.  A milestone that Jacques decided to celebrate by inviting a handful of Maltese bloggers, who had set up a blog at around the same time, to share their own thoughts on the state of the blogosfera.  Many of them do not blog any more, for a variety of reasons - from boredom and a poor return on the time invested in the lonely practice of blogging to the allure of social networks.

I read each of the submissions.  Not just because of my research, but because I know most of the bloggers - some are close friends.  Their tales of memory tinged with the faintest whiff of nostalgia inevitably made me think of this semi-dormant blog of mine:

The blog is your Church. It is at the hub of what you really want to say. Where you reflect, where you develop your essay-type ideas. Where you talk to your (real or imaginary) congregation. The congregation is assembled elsewhere (Facebook, for the time being). It will occasionally visit your Church if, like a lapsed Catholic, it is reminded of your daily service should you choose to broadcast some snippets from the pulpit of your Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr…

The blog stopped being a community years ago. The community does not find entertainment in the Church any more. But it knows that now and again, it needs something more than entertainment if it wishes to reflect beyond the immediate reflexive cycles of the social network.

The blog is not dead. It’s just increasingly one-way media broadcast. Still the channel of choice for the political, the mavericks and trouble-makers. Increasingly devoured by the old, battered media. By those looking for chinks in their fortresses and signs of resistance to their hegemony in civil society.

The reflections of Jacques's bloggers in arms are well worth reading:

David Friggieri

Fausto Majjistral

Pierre J Mejlak

Immanuel Mifsud

Toni Sant

ġakbu sfi*o

Mark Vella

Alex Vella Gera

Some things don't quite translate from one culture to another.

Some things never seem to change.

Take Breakfast TV on BBC 1 - an excellent example of British ethnography.  Yesterday, somewhere in between shaving and a pre-breakfast coffee in my room at the excellent Ashburton in Scarborough - a discussion at 7.30 in a car park on a new report on how people park their cars in shopping malls. Apparently women drivers park better, and between the lines. Cue woman driver in a pink car parking nicely between the lines.

Now compare this with my country, where I remember one man's claim to fame was 'parking' his Ford Escort with halogen lights on full beam, on the 'zuntier' of the parish church with 'Highway to Hell' blasting from his 'X-treme' sound system. 

Definition of zuntier: huge space plus steps in front of a church, used by people who like to drift out of mass for a fag; or for the erection of billboards (against divorce, solicitation of donations, advertising the Pork Fair in the Pjazza etc.)

There has to be some reason for these wrinkles.  The crows-feet.  The deep furrows etched permanently on what used to be sun-tanned skins.  

My mother used to say they were laughter lines.  Grooves of happiness and the good life.  Then again, she used to call the big mole on the tip of her nose a beauty spot.  I think she always found a way of looking at things differently.  Or maybe that's how you survive when you are one of 10 and have such little time for yourself.

We're clocking down to Christmas, and Christmas is for kids.  This short film captures why.

I have to give a TEDx talk in a week.  The title is locked.  I've got an idea of sorts, in my head.  I've tinkered with some slides.  I've tried to listen to the inner voice, the one that never lies, that is your harshest critic. My son has drawn me a cartoon to try and help me out.

The thing is - TED talks are about imparting wisdom. And it's mostly the wisdom of experience.   Yet since I got on this learning / research path of mine, I've seen many of my core beliefs getting challenged and deconstructed.  Once you touch academia, you have to re-learn humility.  Where, in the consulting world, it is all about getting the big idea quickly and then using your energies to take your client on the same journey with you, in academia it is about constantly looking around and over your shoulders, before you start to try and make any impression.  

TED just seems to raise that bar higher.  It's about a curious mix of theatre, performance and authenticity.  We all know the great TED talks - Robinson, Oliver, Godin, Shirky - there is a roll call of names and performance, growing by the day.

I have less than 7 days to dig deep into whatever well of experience and failure I have within me - and find what needs to be said.

Found the process fascinating.  And very Howard Rheingold.

I've listened to this several times.  The fact that I'm embedding it here means that it's still not registering.

I'm a writer.  I've researched countless business situations, found problems, identified solutions, wrote up reports, made presentations, mobilised people and budgets and sometimes even ran the whole cavalry myself.

And yet, writing up this blessed thesis fills the soul with dread. And I don't even have to teach. Best advice from this one: a writer is someone who writes the thesis, not someone who reads about it.

<div style="width:425px" id="__ss_2107714"> <strong style="display:block;margin:12px 0 4px">How to Finish Your PhD</strong> <div style="padding:5px 0 12px"> View more webinars from Tim Kastelle </div> </div>

Wondering at madness that compels people to do a PhD. Ruins your back, finances & social life. Arguably generates zero return on investment. Makes you talk to yourself in your sleep & listen to obscure music instead of writing the ground-breaking stuff nobody else can write for you. Eternal blinking at a blank monitor. Every day, you realise how little you, and everyone else knows about anything, and that the world still does whatever it has to do regardless. 

Sure, I was made for this.

To understand an island

you have to approach it 

from the water.

Right now, the boy is asleep, tangled with Pickles, the bear with long arms, who also celebrated his eighth birthday today.

We're hot on milestones in my family.

Today, in between the hugs, presents, cassatellas at Fontanella, and the blowing of candles on a chocolate cake, Jacob and I found ourselves watching the video below.  We both agreed that one day out of 365 where people could stop fighting each other was something worth fighting for.  And for a moment, I actually thought of telling my son of how his own existence is tied to 9/11, that most graphically violent of events for people from the West.  But just as I was trying to work out how to approach the subject of Al Qaeda as a different form of social network and notions of US imperialism, Jacob had slipped quietly to the next room to draw another one of his cartoons of large men in tight suits.

My life changed completely nine years ago, for the better.  Like millions of others, I know that I owe my child everything.

I have more than a passing interest in this. 

<p>Manuel Castells from Jean-Baptiste Dumont on Vimeo.</p>