If you write a blog, you know how addictive statistics can be…

I am so thrilled… I made it! This blog registered 16,480 unique visitors in July!

Exceeding the 16,000 mark is an exhilarating feeling.

I am so grateful to my co-author Yang-May for convincing me to start  X-Culture in 2007.  This blog has enabled me to find my voice after years of practicing financial journalism and hiding behind mergers & acquisitions and derivatives.

Two years ago, it became a lifeline during the many long days I spent in isolation writing our book. I used X-Culture to float ideas. The comments I received were like a bridge to the world outside my study… which seemed so distant to me at the time.

And …it’s always exciting when someone I have not met before tells me that they feel they already know me because they have read my blog.

X-Culture is really the closest you can get to a window into my mind and soul.

By using Feedjit, I can check the countries where my visitors are located. It is such a strange feeling to know that thousands of people from Hawaii to Pakistan are reading what I think and feel.

I would like to thank my family, friends and colleagues for inspiring many of my posts over the past three years. I am also grateful to my fellow social networkers for linking to my blog and spreading its messages on Twitter and other platforms.

And of course I would like to thank all of you for reading me and for travelling with me on this incredible journey.

I realised last week just how trendy my life has become.

And I don’t mean because I am hanging out in ritzy bars. I have been working far too hard for that…

I have been following recently the various media sagas and their side-dramas.

General McChrystal spinning out of control and turning Rolling Stone Magazine into a household name….

The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico becoming a regular feature of my beloved Daily Show with Jon Stewart while inspiring one of the most hilarious YouTube videos I have ever seen…

And yes… I feel trendy because, in the same week, I had an editor upset me… for the first time in many years.

What do you do when, together with the edits, you are sent a long email with a lecture in journalism?

No, you don’t mention that the person writing the email has far fewer springs on their back than you do…. No, you don’t embark on a litany of all the newspapers and other media you have written for in the past 18 years…

All this runs counter to your meditation practice.

So, I just went into the kitchen, played a CD with my mantras, chanted for 10 minutes…

And I cooled down. It worked. That… and venting on my blog, which, as you know, I don’t usually do.

So thanks for listening to me this time.

I used to be in love with the inverted pyramid.

It would give a structure to my stories. When I worked as a journalist, it would serve as the scaffolding of my day… organising my thoughts, the results of my research and the quotes I would get from my interviews.

However, may be…  it’s time to move on.

In an article just published in Communication World,  Angelo Fernando writes about how “in the future, every story will need to have a beginning, a middle and a hyperlink”.

Hyperlinks put our texts into perspective and connect them with “the broader universe in which your story will live”.

We have to start thinking of every text as “an opportunity to be woven into a larger, ever-developing story line”.

Angelo also talks about the new print-to-Web experience.

Esquire magazine has just come out with its first Augmented Reality issue. The cover and some of the pages have codes. When held up to a web cam, the codes let the reader interact with the content (as shown in the video below).

It still feels a bit gimmicky to me…. but we might be on to something here.

Where is Augmented Reality Journalism taking us… I can’t wait to find out.

My first day in Marrakesh last week I woke up at 4:00am to the chant of the muezzin.

I was drifting in and out of sleep. While he was chanting, I was dreaming of how to use social media to call the faithful to prayer…

That’s when I realised just how badly I needed a vacation….

From Marrakesh I travelled to the High Atlas. I took in the stunning views and visited a couple of Berber villages. The peace and silence are incredible. They make you wonder how we can all inhabit the same planet and yet live in such different dimensions.

I am happy to have left a small part of me there. I gave a pen to a pretty young Berber girl who was following us. She took it and held it close to her chest. If I close my eyes, I can still see her tan fingers clutching my black biro. I wish the pen were some kind of magical device that could link me to this girl. So that every time she writes, my dreams and hers would merge.

Writing is such a strange obsession. It drives you crazy. I have the feeling that if I don’t write, I don’t exist. At the same time, that’s what helps me to relive my memories. And blogging helps me to connect with people. I might have already discovered my magical device after all…

I believe writer’s block happens for a reason.

Whenever I suffer from it, I get angry. But once it’s over, I realise that it was simply a way for my mind to take time out and go deeper.

My best writing has often followed attacks of writer’s block.

I was therefore horrified to find out that Derman Pharmaceuticals is developing a drug “to help people become better communicators, facilitating the flow of language and helping people think and speak more clearly”.

Inspiration for your writing is supposed to come from somewhere deep inside you. It’s an expression of everything you have done so far in your life and what you stand for.  

The same applies to public speaking. In order to connect with your audience, you have to tap into the very essence of who you are and make it available to them.

How can a drug replace that?
COMMUCLEAR might be the latest communications fad… or is it a symptom of something more disturbing? Is this drug a reflection of our addiction to content that is churned out endlessly… only for the sake of writing or speaking…?

Luckily, we live in the era of the interactive web. You might pop as many COMMUCLEAR pills as you want, but if your messages are not authentic and lack real commitment… people won’t be willing to spread them…

Social media come with a strong B.S. detector…. We shouldn’t forget that!

Once you get over the slightly annoying voice…  this video is great at explaining the transformation the publishing industry is currently going through.

I had been looking for something like this. Something that would describe how publishing might be dying unless we change the way we look at the reader.

Have we entered an era where content is more important than packaging? Say goodbye to good old glossy annual reports!

I work so much with social media that sometimes I forget what it is like to write an article for good old print media.

That’s exactly what I had to do this week.

I was amazed to see how much I have got used to blogging and twittering.

Writing for a newspaper, as I used to do every day in my previous life as a journalist, feels like remembering how to use the fountain pen you had in school.
 
Journalism has always been an integral part of me and my way of thinking. Deep down, I believe… I will always be a journalist…

But here is what I miss most these days when I have to write for newspapers or magazines:
• the ability to insert links and connect my ideas to the views and believes of other people. Print media does not allow multidimensional texts.
• the opportunity to use multipliers like Twitter and Facebook and post my text simultaneously on different sites.
• the immediate reactions you get from posting online. With print media you have to wait for your article to come out…that might take a couple of months… and by that time you might already be on to another subject.
• The feeling of community you get when you hit the right topic and people start to create a buzz around your post.

I can’t tell you how good it feels to be blogging again today!

I had my first Twinterview the other day.

Angelo Fernando of Hoi Polloi interviewed me and Yang-May on Twitter about the book.

What an interesting experience…. You feel suspended in cyberspace. You know there are people out there following you… but all you can see are your interviewer’s Tweets.

The fact that you have to limit your answers to 140 characters is a great discipline. It helps to organise your thoughts.

I have been converted…. I believe Twinterviews are great training for podcast and video interviews. Think of a 140-character answer first and then elaborate on that.

The toughest question, as ever, was about the reasons that lead me to write the book: “Was there a book inside your head?”

In order to answer that, you need to put your life in perspective.

Luckily, I am reading a book that has helped me to do just that.

If you began your career in journalism, you have to read Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler.

It’s a wonderful example of how journalism and writing helps you to understand complex realities and relate to people in cultures so different from your own.

It was a sentence in the book that brought it all home to me. Hessler describes his years in Beijing like a “floating life in a floating city”.

When I lived in Prague in the early 1990s, I often had the feeling of floating…. Oracle Bones made me realise that I wasn’t lost… Prague was floating towards a new future and was taking me along. While doing this, it was also writing my future book in my head.

Never underestimate the power of floating…

The ability to write is such a mixed blessing.

It is an integral part of who you are and you can’t do without it. A friend of mine who edits a magazine in the US told me once that only when she writes she feels that she is doing real work.

I have this nagging feeling sometimes when I am in meetings that I should not be there… I should be at my computer instead….writing. As if I had to report everything I experience… every day… ever minute.

To complicate the matter, the business communication profession is often misunderstood. Why do companies need professional writers and story tellers, given that everybody can more or less knock a couple of sentences together?

Next time you are asked this question, you can quote Colonel David Scott.

Scott was the commander of the Apollo 15 mission to the moon. Ever since his lunar landing in 1971, Scott spent much of his time talking to people who wanted to know how it was like to walk on the moon. He slipped into an unexpected role and became the mission’s story teller.

Scott realised that flying to the moon had been such a pivotal experience in the history of humanity that it wasn’t enough for people to see a couple of minutes of filming on TV. They needed to hear the story from somebody who was there. They needed another human being to tell them how it felt. It was important for them in order to be able to integrate this event into their consciousness.

This is why Scott is calling for the crew of future missions to the moon or Mars to include non-scientists, people able to describe the splendour of the cosmos. “It could be an artist or a poet or a writer - or even a songwriter”.

What a great endorsement for our profession!!!

“You don’t choose to take up writing; writing chooses you.”

This is what British novelist of Ukrainian origin Marina Lewycka believes and I tend to agree with her.

Every time I would try to do something that did not involve writing, I would hear this voice in my head scolding me and reminding me of why I am here. Almost as if the purpose of my life were to report on everything I experience and what I believe in. For whom? As part of what? It is a mystery to me.

The future of written text is another mystery.

I gave a presentation at a conference in Paris last week and some of the questions I got were around this topic. Will text survive? Or will it be replaced by video and sound? For somebody who can hardly take pictures with her Blackberry (luckily I have colleagues who are better than me at operating a camera…); this is a truly frightening thought.

I was reflecting on this horrifying prospect during my train ride back from Paris, when I stumbled into the news of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer closing down after 146 years for lack of ad revenues and being replaced by a slimmed-down online version.

According to Deloitte, one out of every 10 print publications will have to reduce their frequency, go online or close down in 2009.

How will the post-print world look like?