James Avery’s blog

November 5, 2009

A serious point about the Cowfilms joke thread on twitter

Filed under: Blogging, Internet, Politics, Social Networking, Time Management — Tags: , , , — admin @ 12:22 am

For anyone who isn’t a regular twitter user, this post will probably make little sense, so I’ll try and unravel it slowly, rather than at the 140 characters maximum speed of light that twitter operates at.

Each day, twitter lists top ‘trending topics’, which could be on any subject - some serious, some not so serious. The cowfilms thread is definetely on the silly side - basically, make any connection between a film title and a cow related theme.

Here are a few of my favourite 10 so far:

  1. Moo Cowsand and One: A Steak Udderssey - @julianyon
  2. The Cud, the Bad and the Ungulate - @ginpitwarrior
  3. Bonfire of the Vachequirits
  4. Friesian Loathing In Las Vegas - @scoop_cooper
  5. 24 Hour Patty People (featuring Happy Moodays)
  6. The Cudfather
  7. Cry Friesian - @davidschneider (of Alan Partridge fame)
  8. Methane, myself and Irene @rumdoodle
  9. There Will Brie Cud
  10. Ruminator 2 : Cudgement Day

So what’s so great about this obviously pointless and frivolous waste of time? Well, actually, if they say that laughter is the best medicine, then this thread is the best stuff in the cabinet. In some respects, it feels like the internet can turn into one big pub conversation - yet no-one has to pay a penny to get their round in, and there’s no side effects to this humour pill, apart from a little bit of procrastination.

Now I know that I’m part of the fortunate digital elite, and that I can dip in and out of twitter as I please - some workplaces have quite wisely cracked down on internet usage, and not everyone has the internet at home.

But there’s another serious side to all this - today’s big twitter topic may have been humour related (there’s another thread going about blaming everything on P Diddy), but at other times, the top trends are politically related, as we saw when the UK truly dominated the twitter charts two weeks ago when Nick Griffin appeared on Question Time. For non-British readers, Nick Griffin is the leader of the far-right, racially motivated, British National Party.

Another top trending topic today has been the elections in Iran. Now there was a lot of media attention back when the elections were first run, and a lot of people were able to get their opinions out on twitter. This time round, on the 30th anniversary of the US embassy hostage crisis, we’re hearing calls of support for the USA, rather than the usual death chants.

So, let’s say long live twitter, and long live the American dream which created it, all the way from the farms of Nebraska.

November 1, 2009

How long could you live without money?

Filed under: Blogging, Internet, Making Money Online — Tags: , — admin @ 3:41 am

OK, let’s take a break from any posts about making money online. How long could you live without the stuff for?

I’m just skimming through a blog written by Mark Boyle, who is approaching the end of living for a year without money - a concept he terms as the ‘freeconomy‘. I’ll have to admit that there’s a lot that I like about some of the basic ideas of the Freeconomy - in essence, the idea that not everything is about money money money - but for me, this is always something to exist alongside our greedy capitalist world, not as a replacement for it.

Apparently, Mark’s big conversion was from watching ‘Gandhi’ during his final year as an economics student at university. I think that’s when many of us started our conversion away from wishy-washy idealism and towards how things work in the real world. Still, every day without spending money is a day when an internet marketer can’t fail to improve his or her bank balance - but I guess not spending money, and just not using it full stop, are two separate concepts. I still prefer the former, but it doesn’t take an idealist or a beatle to tell you that money isn’t everything, and that all you need is love - most entrepreneurs and self improvement manuals will tell you that aswell. You just might have to fork out a small amount of cash to pay for them.

October 3, 2009

Last month I made a paltry £10 through blogging. I just want to double this each month!

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Internet, Making Money Online, Time Management — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — admin @ 1:06 pm

Forget about all these wild claims about making thousands online from signing up to someone else’s automated scripts programme!

I don’t want to earn a fortune, I just want to double this amount every month for a year! Hang on a minute, after a few months, this starts to look quite juicy:

September £10
October £20
November £40
December £80
January £160
February £320
March £640
April £1,280
May £2,560
June £5,120
July £10,240
August £20,480

Oh, the powers of compound growth! Of course, doubling for the next few months should be child’s play, but who knows what will happen after that.

To clarify - I am looking at building up Adsense and perhaps other affiliate revenue from blogging alone, and not from Flightmapping.com, which is a dedicated travel website, albeit one built using very last millenium web 1.0 Architecture! Flightblogging.com is a standalone blog related to, but getting very little traffic from, Flightmapping.com, and my own personal blog is now building up slowly too. I also expect to re-instate a couple of other long standing blog projects, whereas the World Tube Map concept may evolve into an online discussion with some revenue opportunity, but the main aim of this is to actually sell physical printed maps, which don’t count as online revenue.

You might ask why current earnings are so low. The reasons are simple - I am a relative latecomer to the social networking and blogging scene, having put so much effort into building Flightmapping.com as a content portal, and focusing purely on SEO around the quantity of text, rather than playing the link building and social networking game. I am declaring my hand as a newbie in this field - and I want to learn - FAST!

Hopefully progress will develop with some good advice from friends old and new.

As always, keep your seat backs firmly upright, Pay Attention Meticulously, and enjoy the journey!

December 14, 2008

Actually, creative people DO think inside the box

Filed under: Chess Board Maps, Internet, Trivia — admin @ 7:45 pm

The term “think outside the box” has to be my most hated phrase, competing alongside the dreaded S word (solutions) for the platinum coated trophy of meaningless business speak. So why am I so proud to say that I do think INSIDE the box?

To me, thinking inside the box is a simple case of having an objective, and then defining the boundaries which are relevant for reaching that objective.  For example, the Chess Board Map I posted a couple of weeks ago might not make that much sense as a blog post, but it is very easy to explain in front of someone. I said I’d give it to my dad and let him work it out over the weekend. He’s back for the Christmas holiday now, and he worked out the first 20 or so cities in about 10 minutes. He did so, because it made sense to him. Likewise, the map was a lively discussion point with a fellow travel website owner at a Christmas party last week, because again, he thinks visually too.

I am still trying to find that magic bridge between the two different types of thinking, so I’m not quite there yet. Our Christmas greeting comes with the text “from Aalborg to Zweibrucken” or “Anchorage to Dunedin“. A to Z is for the conventional thinkers - yet Zweibrucken actually means “Two Bridges” in German. My grandparents used to live in Burgess Hill, which is not too far from Three Bridges in Sussex - but I digress - One Bridge is all I’m trying to cross here!

In the meantime, if you want simple instructions on drawing a map pr plan to demonstrate any point (remember that MAP is an anacronym for Make Anything Possible), please scroll down below:

 

      A                                                                 B
             a     b     c     d      e      f     g     h     i    
1     /     A     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     \
2     /     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     \
3     /     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     \
4     /     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     \
5     /     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     \
6     /     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     \
7     /     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     \
8     /     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     \
9     /     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     D     \
      C                                                                  D

  • To hand draw: Draw the letter Z, starting at point A, and passing through points B and C to reach D.
  • This represents the basic differentiation between traditional (A to Z) thinkers and visual (A to D through Z) thinkers.
  • It also shows that the best thinkers actually DO think inside the box after all!
     

October 10, 2008

So is the internet really a Cesspool?

Filed under: Internet, Time Management — admin @ 3:36 pm

So, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has just called the internet a ‘cesspool‘ - where ‘false information thrives.’ Sure, there is a lot of junk out there, but isn’t it Google’s job to work out how to filter the spamalotters from the quality content? Sorry, I should have just said spam, spam and more bloody spam! Cesspool, cess, pool, Google, whatever - any sensible reader knows the difference between internet junk and quality content, just as a diner at the Savoy Grill wouldn’t expect to be fed with luncheon meat.

So does Google really no longer trust itself to fulfil its role as the sewage works of the internet? If not, then it must be time for someone else to come along and do a better job.

Correct information v Useful Information

Whatever Google says or does, we shouldn’t forget the original founding purpose of its search engine - to categorise the world’s information — Google was a popular mis-spelling of the word “googol”, which means 1 followed by 100 zeros. Whenever I think of this, I think of General Gogol from the Bond movies - but I guess he might well have had to remember 100 digit long secret codes!

There’s no doubt that the information is out there on Google - even if some of the highest ranking sites are not exactly of the quality Google likes to say they should be. Sometimes though, I’m not sure if it really matters whether the information is there or not - how much of it do we really need. The internet may or may not be a cesspool, but the amount of information it contains is certainly infinite. So if Google could just give the right answer without all the other junk, then they really would be able to clean up.

PS - I thought I’d test that out by asking the old politicians’ question of “What is 2 + 2″? Amazingly, Google does just come back with the result of 2 + 2 = 4 - and no other clutter. Then I tried finding a reference to David Blunkett thinking 7 x 8 = 54. No wonder I couldn’t find it - that was Stephen Byers!

Infinet Distractions

Anyway, as I was saying, there’s just too much information out there on the internet - some of it useful, some of it less so. Back to work!

 

September 18, 2008

What is PC speak for killing time?

Filed under: Internet, Time Management, Travel — admin @ 7:16 pm

Well, mainly due to my own lack of planning, I have a couple of hours to spend here on some worn out keyboard in a corner internet cafe in Granada, before trying to get into Alhambra for an evening visit (all day tickets were sold out). For any pedants reading this, I am talking about Granada´s Alhambra fort ‘ yes, “the” Alhambra, except that this is technically a misnomer, as Alhambra means “The Red One”, and I´m not going to visit “The The Red One”. Anyway, I digress - what was I saying about needing to kill some time?

Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia doesn´t have much to say on the matter. That great bastion of PC speak is probably quite happy with the concept of killing time, as so much of said activity is done on their own website! Well, at least you should learn something from each visit to Wikipedia, although if your name is Vernon Kay, then perhaps Wikipedia is one website you could do without!

A quick scan of Google for the phrase “killing time” (well, this is Spanish Google, so there might be better results in the UK) comes up with a hardcore band from New York, “Murder Consultants” (of the gaming variety, not hitmen - Dixon Jones of Receptional can sort anyone out in the UK looking for this kind of event in & around London), a Youtube spinoff and a book about Death Row in the USA.

No-one out there is giving much by way of definition or origin of the phrase (although according to Wikipedia, it has been used in the New York Times as far back as 1893), beyond the obvious. So in our 21st century society of re-branding and doublespeak, how should the phrase “killing time” be re-packaged to suggest a more productive use of such temporal luxuries?

Or would the PC brigade baulk at the suggestion that all time should be used constructively? After all, if exam failure in schools, sorry, learning communities, is now called “deferred success”, then sitting idle for a couple of hours is surely just “deferred activity”? Next time I´m sitting on the sofa watching another pointless squabble on Fox, I´ll think of that as my “deferred gym session” - but at least there are supposed to be a few feel good benefits from having a bit of a chuckle at some of the morons they get on that programme - everything in moderation as they say!

Well, that´s about 30 minutes so far of doing stuff which is mildly productive, and which has certainly managed to keep my attention going - so I certainly don´t think I need to go and turn myself in to the Time Police just yet! And if it means I´ve made my first non-political blog post in over 3 months, that can´t be too bad either.

But I´m still no closer to that definition. Answers on a PC please (that´s postcard, or comment sent from your Personal Computer - not reporting me to the Politically Correct Brigade or the local Police Constable).

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