Provided the Times of Malta's books editor got it right and you enjoyed my short review of those three 'naughty' books, curiosity might have got the better of you. Thanks for visiting and welcome to my corner of the blogosphere and one of around 50 active Maltese blogs.

While TIME magazine has made a big hue and cry about the Web 2.0 internet revolution - going as far as to confer its annual Person Of The Year award to bloggers and YouTubers worldwide - blogging has, until now, received scant attention in Malta. The people you'd expect to enjoy this sort of thing - the small battalion of local media pundits - have barely acknowledged that it's happening at all. And those of them who constantly complain about the stagnation of Maltese life and politics, haven't exactly embraced the injection of new, mostly fresh (and young) new voices. This might change this year as politicians and priests have recently joined in the blogging fun, surely to be followed by a faithful, and numerous, following.

The Big Issues of 2006 have been tackled in this blog and by several of our favourite bloggers (see the list on the right). Whether it was the ugly rise of racist spiel, Christ on Malta's euro coins, the Eurovision song contest or the Gift of Life campaign, bloggers have written about it, had a crack at the usual pundits' take on things, laughed at it and fed into the raging debate. But while the rise and rise of racist talk on the net rightly got plenty of media coverage, the voices for tolerance and the campaigns by Maltese bloggers like Xifer, J'Accuse and Lanzarote got scant attention. But we predict that this will change. As Harry Vassallo's article in last Sunday's Independent shows, people might be starting to pay a bit more attention. We'll see what 2007 has in store.

A Happy New Year to you all!