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Flag-draped caskets of the 42 out of the 44 slain Special Action Force members were transported to Manila’s Villamor Air Base on Jan. 29. Photo from the PNP-PIO Facebook Page.

Full credit goes to President BS Aquino for uniting the nation twice this week, but for the wrong reasons: First, in grief over the loss of 44 members of the elite Special Action Force (SAF) in a bloody operation he approved; and second, in fury, over the chief executive’s snubbing of the arrival honors at Villamor Air Base for the fallen elite cops.

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Pope Francis’ recent visit to the Philippines, long considered the world’s social media capital, “set several Twitter records”, despite orders of the government to take down cellular and mobile data signals everywhere he went.

By the time he arrives in the Vatican, the Pope will see that Filipinos not only gave him the biggest Papal event in history – but also made him the most popular ever on the Philippine side of Twitter as well as making his tweets coinciding with his visit to the country his most popular ever.

Conventional wisdom today would say that an assembly of bloggers is like cats and dogs put together in one tiny space. We are said to be too feisty and too self-centered to cooperate among ourselves. We value our personal freedoms so much that we cannot be trusted to work together in a common cause.

Such conventional wisdom has been disproven each day and week for the past 5 years and the living reminder of fruitful and important collaboration among bloggers is the continuing project called BlogWatch, which officially turns five today, Nov. 24.