The weather is so good I’m extending my spring break for another two days.

See you on Wednesday.

The word “blog” and its derivatives “blogger” and “blogging” must be the most commonly used words in the blogosphere. You simply can’t get away from them. Some bloggers use them in every other sentence — at least.

For me, each time I read one of them in a blog, it’s like a very large cow pat falling from the sky in front of me. Bloggers [splat] who give a running commentary on their blogs [splat] and their blogging [splat] and then do the same for other bloggers [splat] and their blogs [splat] really need to get away from their blogs [splat] more.

The whole subject of blogs, bloggers and blogging [splat, splat, splat] has been obsessed to death on the internet. Even if you use asterixes you can’t escape : as in bl*gs, bl*ggers and bl*gging [spl*t, spl*t, spl*t].

Don’t get me wrong, I love the art and freedom of ******** [*****], but I just don’t want to see that word again in case one day a cow pat lands on my head [splat].

If you have ever dreamed of moving to an exotic, sun-kissed location overlooking a sapphire sea, you’ll want to follow the adventures of Guy Adams who did just that. Helpfully he’s now writing about it in Syntagma Digital’s newest webtitle : Where Lizards Play, part of our LifeTimes network magazine.

Guy, his partner Debra, and their two children moved from England to Spain’s Costa Blanca with a view to a view — over the Mediterranean, that is. Now read on …

Guy Adams is a full-time professional author and writer, as well as being a partner and senior editor in a publishing company. His reasons for moving to Spain are quite simple :

Everyone’s doing it you know. We’re all moving out here now. Where once you couldn’t move for thick accented fishermen and ‘Marias’ beating their front step clean with their noble mops, the Costa Blanca is filling with escapees from other walks of life. And why not?

I now live my life with the ocean in front of me and mountains to the rear. I live and work in the shade of mountains…this, for me, cannot be understated as a fine reason to swop England for the Costa Blanca.

Life is an adventure, always, this will be where I share mine.

How could you resist?

There’s an interesting (sort of) meme starting up on Robert Scoble’s blog. Following his dip into U.S. Presidential politics with John Edwards, Scoble gets back on-topic with a thankfully short post, “I Hate Eggplant”.

A treat for Scoble: Eggplant Sandwiches.

Eggplant is an old British name for what we Brits now call aubergines — at least among the ratatouille set. I can tell Robert that naming them aubergines — for which I blame the French — does nothing to improve their flavour.

As for my pet culinary hate, it’s got to be pickled onions.

I suppose my real complaint is with the vinegar, a quite appalling liquid concoction, composed of an alcoholic beverage gone rankly sour. Onions I like, but soak them in vinegar and the result is a product worthy of the dark arts.

The weird thing, though, is that the only time I found aubergines / eggplant palatable was when they were fried and served with ever-so-thin slices of … pickled onions!

Is this a case of the mathematical law that two negatives make a positive?

So what foodstuff do you think should never have been invented by the Almighty, let alone the hand of Man?

Straight from the horse’s mouth, we’re hearing that b5media is relocating its offices across Toronto. Our information suggests they are going up in the world, leaving their two-man basement for a three-man cave.

Can it really be true that a “major blog network”, funded by venture capital, is operating from a cave? Well, Jeremy says so. It must be true. What humility.

Here at Syntagma, we have obtained the first footage of the entire b5 team of ten hard at work in their new cave :

Isn’t that the sweetest thing you’ve ever seen?

In complete contrast, Syntagma Media has from the beginning worked out of the palatial, Grade 1-listed pile of Syntagma Towers, pictured below :

In case you’re wondering, the figure in the foreground is yours truly, kneeling in thanks for our good fortune. What you don’t see are the hordes of paparazzi gathered beneath the battlements.

And just to quash the latest rumour : no, Kate Middleton doesn’t work for us. She’s just joined the b5ers in their cave.

I work hard at not writing about blogging these days, but something always turns up and I’m forced to relent. This one is irresistible for a number of reasons.

Keith Waterhouse is a British National Treasure. He’s incredibly old, being the author of that 1950s smash hit novel and film, Billy Liar. He claimed to be one of the “Angry Young Men” — all the rage in those days — but his sense of humour prevented him ever being angry enough.

He went on to become a very good journalist and playwright, defender of the apostrophe (everyone’s entitled to some eccentricity), and author of a long-running column in the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper.

And it’s to the latter we turn for his views on blogging. Yesterday, he published a piece titled, “Blogging our way to the true story”.

He begins characteristically : “And a happy blogging New Year to bloggers everywhere. I don’t think.” That’s Keith for you. Sharp and to the point.

He continues, “Meaning I cannot be doing with blogging, bloggers or blogs.” He quotes an example of a typical Christmas blog : “Tarquin, as well as being Head Boy, is now First Triangle in the school orchestra, which gives him a place in next year’s Carnegie Hall and Hollywood Bowl all-schools production of Peter and the Wolf.”

But even worse, he says, is the rise of the grandiosely termed Citizen Journalism. “They print hearsay as hard fact. They lift news items from orthodox sources and embellish them in their own wild words. They twist the newspaper writer’s motto, which is Get It First, Get It Right, to read : Get It Second, Get It Wrong.”

Blimey, someone’s rattled his cage. I hope it wasn’t me.

But he has a solution to this morass of unseemly garbage into which he despatches all bloggers : “To all pejorative references to the phrase ‘Citizen Journalist’ please add : ‘– unless they have a camera’. … I make an exception in the case of photographs.”

Here he goes on at length about the Saddam Hussein execution : “The bloggers were there, though, armed with picture-snatching mobile phone cameras. The official photo coverage … was grisly enough. The bloggers’ contribution — grabbed at the gallows … shocked all right thinking people. … the sheer brutality of the scene takes[s] us back to the public hanging of felons at Tyburn in the 18th century.”

In other words, blogging is OK so long as it tells us a truth that mainstream media is locked out from. Bloggers are forever condemned to be bandits and outlaws, stealing banned information and news of private events that the law and other agencies try to conceal from us.

Well, it’s a tidy gap in the market, if a bit hard to live up to on a daily basis. If this is the view of an old-time journalist and general good egg, blogging does suffer from an image problem. But then, we’ve been saying that here for a long time.

I can’t help feeling that if Waterhouse rewrote Billy Liar for our times, Billy would be a blogger.

Come Saturday mornings and one of my first ports of call is Bob Cringely’s column over at PBS.org. This week he makes his communications predictions for 2007.

When you look at how close he came last year (despite getting only 60pc absolutely correct), you’ll be forced to take this new batch seriously.

Three out of the 15 caught my sparrowhawk eye.

10) The year the net crashed (in the USA). Video overwhelms the net and we all learn that the broadband ISPs have been selling us something they can’t really deliver.

This follows on from some highly technical discussions he posted last year on various aspects of bandwidth and internet provision across the U.S. All that bit haulage stuff is way above my knowledge-basin, so I’ll just comment that it sounded pretty plausible to me, as does this. Video is clearly getting out of hand, with BitTorrent taking 30pc of current bandwidth, mostly for anything but HD viewing. This must explode at some point, and 2007 is as good a guess as any.

13) Sand Hill Road [VC-land in Silicon Valley] goes into a panic when it becomes clear that there is more money available than good opportunities for investing it, shades of 1999. No bubble this time, though, because the reasons behind the effect are different — there is a decided lack of IPO activity — but VCs will still be excessively crashing their MacLaren F1s as they see their era fading.

Well, at least they don’t drive Ferraris — British F1s are always preferable and much more James Bond. Back to the point : so Cringe expects a series of selective crashes rather than one Big Bang, like in 2000/1.

You’ve got to go with that given that entrepreneurs are oh so careful nowadays, many bootstrapping their businesses with clever cash-flow techniques, or using Angel finance. Our very own Syntagma Media has avoided the debt-trap like the pox. And while venture capital is nominally money-debt free, there’s still a debt of expectation clinging to the exit strategy.

But an excess of money has a simpler solution than just backing anything that grunts. They could always return the money to their investors and drive vintage Cadillacs instead of MacLarens. But that would destroy the complex infrastructure of sandcastles that VCs build to define their businesses.

The best prediction is left not only till last, but left dangling on a precipice.

15) Google’s Grand Plan is finally revealed, explaining all. Hey, wait, that’s next week’s column!

Apocalypse Now — or rather, next week. This will be all about shadowy shipping-container datacenters, personalized IP-TV advertising, and the buying up of all that hidden dark fiber in the bowels of the earth.

It could be a Dan Brown novel. Maybe Cringely is his agent!

Warning : Huge tangential diversion coming up.

If you’re American you may not remember much about the summer of 2005. If you’re English, you’ll have instant recall of almost every passing, nail-biting minute.

It started with triumph. An announcement that London had won the 2012 Olympic Games amazed the nation — we don’t normally win that sort of thing. Everybody was in party mood. The media was throbbing with excitement.

That euphoric moment turned to ashes the very next day. England’s long-expected 9/11 arrived at last. 7/7 saw the quadruple bombing of the London Underground, or Tube as it’s known locally, and a single bus full of people. Fifty-two people died and around 700 were maimed or injured.

To call these events a rollercoaster ride is something of an understatement. Never was the mood of one city turned on its head so swiftly. But rollercoaster was the only word to describe the rest of the summer, thanks to one astonishing, almost archetypal, sporting event. The Battle for the Ashes 2005.

The Ashes is a small urn containing the burned remains of a set of cricket bails, some say stumps, that were incinerated when Australia first beat England at the greatest game on earth back in 1888, or some such distant epoch.

Now they were up for grabs again in a tussle between the world’s best cricketers, the Aussies, who hardly ever lost, and a young England team that was fit, well-led and bursting with spirit.

The rest is sporting history, for only an Ashes test series can be called Titanic. Why? Because it lasts for 25 days spread over five, five-day matches, played out over a whole summer.

Never have fortunes swung with such scintillating rapidity. When one team gained mastery, the other fought back with such guile and determination that the very opposite occurred barely minutes later. It was breathtaking and truly heart-stopping. Many people had heart attacks that season. It was a good year for cardiac specialists.

On and on it went, tension so great that even the Queen said she couldn’t bear to watch it. And she was supposed to support each of the sides, since she’s Monarch of both.

England won in the end, but it went to the final day at The Oval Cricket Ground. Had Australia held England to a draw, they would have taken the series and the Ashes, but it was Kevin Pietersen’s flashing blade that carried the day for England in true spectacular, Nelsonian fashion.

England had just committed itself to maybe £20 billion ($38 billion) to host a dreary set of amateur sporting events spread over three weeks seven years away. Yet it had just hosted the finest sporting summer ever witnessed by mere mortals, and it cost nothing.

I won’t describe it again, for you can read it here on Syntagma — the Blog of Record.

Now the return series is about to take place in Australia over a longer and much-hotter down-under summer. The Aussies have won nine of their last ten test matches and seem poised to regain those precious Ashes. England have had mixed fortunes, and lots of injuries, including to their inspirational skipper, Michael Vaughan and the irrepressible Freddy Flintoff, the new captain.

Will it be as great a series as 2005? Will it be as close? Who will win?

I can only quote the fallen American Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, in one of his more pithy moments :

There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

He means, stuff happens.

I’ve resisted changing Syntagma’s header for over a year because I liked it.

However, so many people were complaining their eyes hurt when they looked at it — a good indicator of traffic levels — that I have finally bowed to the popular mood and endless clamour of the blogosphere, and redone the whole thing.

For those folk nostalgic for the old one, fear not. It lives on in the sidebar. And that’s not just because I can’t be bothered to alter it. Its fans can gaze at it and fondly recall “the old days”.

The new one reflects our changing face and role as “a publisher of network magazines”. The effect of old vellum alludes to the paper past of the print format, as well as its durability. After all, no website has lasted as long as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Maybe Syntagma will be the first.