James Avery’s blog

• I am definitely practising my own version of flipping – sleeping from 9-to-5, and working the rest of the day (well, night really) round that, but this week has been pretty good so far, even if I would like to have gone to the twitter discussion event which was on earlier on today in London, but I only found out about that from Murray Newlands’ blog late last night.
• My hours might be totally out of kilter, but I am trying to get into a habit of producing a minimum of 1500 words of ‘useful’ (i.e. commercially proven) content before doing anything else, or at least as soon as I switch the computer on.
• Having said that, the first thing I did when I got ‘up’ today was go for a bike ride, and this was a nice reminder of the joys of cycling along canal tow paths (see upcoming Bling My City post for more about this).
• I haven’t got round to reading or hearing any news today, but the last breaking story which came through last night as I was shutting my computer down was that there had been a military plane crash in Indonesia. No doubt by now we’ve had the usual messages of condolence from the Foreign Office, saying how deeply saddened Mr Miliband is to hear such a tragedy. You always know when they trot out the deeply saddened line that they don’t give a monkey’s, because if they did, they’d say something original.
• Speaking of news, much as though I was glad to finally see the back of speaker Michael Martin, has this not buried a far more significant story about the missing link being found in the evolutionary chain? Surely when we look back at 2009 in 20 years time, this will be one of the most important scientific discoveries of our time, although how it had been kept under wraps for 20 years is another story.
• I was having a good MSN chat with the ever-busy Nadeem from Azam Marketing  last night, and we were both agreed that quick lists like this are quite a useful way of dividing up thoughts, ideas and useful links, but I also wonder if there is a twitter application which could compile up a day’s posts, filter out the idle chit-chat and then integrate the decent ones with WordPress? I guess not, that would require a computer to do some thinking.
• So what useful links could I add today? Michael Dunlop (Income Diary) has an interesting list and discussion of 30 dyslexic entrepreneurs — there’s a few well-known and well documented characters on the list like Richard Branson (Virgin) and David Neeleman (Jet Blue), but I didn’t know about Ingvar Kamprad (IKEA), but can’t exactly say I’m surprised. In certain respects, I’d have asked the question the other way — which entrepreneurs (or major achievers in any field) haven’t had to deal with some form of learning disability, serious emotional challenge or mental illness at some stage in their lives? If you go through the list of the top 10 greatest Britons, I don’t think you’ll find any. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Greatest_Britons
• Speaking of IKEA, it’s about time I went to get some more bowls for the kitchen, and this has to be a lot easier when you have a flashy new city centre IKEA store within walking distance. How many people have bragging rights to that? Seriously though, IKEA has to be one of my most respected brands, and I’m really glad they actually put a bit of thought into designing it.
• Lee McCoy (the Get Visible legend) had an excellent interview with Martin ‘purple’, where he gives a very interesting tip about using social networking sites like twitter to ask questions, rather than just talk about your lunch.
• I also need to look up ZiiTrend, a website about ’social predictions’.
• Meanwhile, Lee himself made some excellent points about blogging being far from dead (I think this particular Internet party is only just getting going), and I certainly concur when he says ‘I agree that Twitter is a much better conversation tool, and when you think that open conversation is the best route to expanding your mind, I still prefer blogging as the nature of my thoughts are essentially verbose. I dislike quick one-liners, it simply isn’t me’.
• Going over some reading from last night, Nadeem also gave a very interesting interview to Murray Newlands, but I think I’ll have to take him up on his comments about Margaret Thatcher later.
• See Flightblogging.com for my upcoming post about Log maps, potentially the next major development in Flightmapping.com.
• Whenever I come up with new ideas, I’m always slightly wary of sticking them straight up on the Internet, because a lot of people say that somebody else might steal them. However, I just don’t think there is much you can really do to copyright protect an idea, so my general feeling on this is to just stick stuff up anyway. I’ve never been short of ideas, so if somebody takes one, well, you know what they say about imitation and flattery.
• Yesterday, Chris Clarkson pointed me to a very interesting article about the Google user experience, and their 10 principles to create a so-called ‘Googley’ website. I think we have a lot to learn, and a lot to do, so that’s enough for now.
• Well, not quite — last night, Nadeem kindly suggested that I should update my blog more often, and I’m glad to say that even though I’ve been doing a couple of posts each day this week, this hasn’t distracted attention from the ongoing text updates for Flightmapping — these will always be like painting the Forth Bridge, but if you really do want to know anything about finding cheap flights to Copenhagen, Stockholm or Oslo, that’s my focus this week. As far as the maths goes, this blog post, like almost all of the content I write, has been created using voice recognition, so it has just taken 20 minutes so far, and maybe another 5 to check. Regardless of whether anyone else reads it or not, I always think it is good to review what you’ve read yourself, especially as there is so much other random information out there. I reckon that between blog posts, twitter updates and news articles, you could quite easily scan through 100 pages in a couple of hours, so spending 15 to 20 minutes summarising the key points has to be time well spent.

Enough for now!