bwagy, the blog of Ben Young

It’s easy to do, in fact in survival situations we gradually do it. Walking in big circles. Unless…

Unless we have a set target, or a goal, if we can keep that in sight we tend to get there.

The challenge is to reduce your possessions till you only have 100 things [2].

Each pen counts, each book counts, item of clothing. You just need to get down to 100.

It is possible, tough, but possible. I once got down to about 76 I recall. It’s now much higher.

But it’s a nice exercise and ethos, what is it that I need? what is adding value? What am I keeping – just because.

It’s almost a classic argument.

A blog is like a house you built yourself from the ground up.

Using a Facebook Page is like renting a shop on a popular street.

If you build the blog, you have to make it interesting enough for people to stop by. You can do what you want.

If you lease, it’s already built & people are already there ready to buy. You just need to personalise and leverage it.

Like most things, you probably want to lease first to get a feel for it, then buy later once you know what you’re doing.

Wow what a new experience, well, since I was flatting anyway. I came in early, had breakfast at a local cafe called Shaky Isles to do some writing and got my breakfast on a chopping board.

The cafe market in Auckland is pretty fierce and this is what happens when competition heats up, organisations have to innovate to hold attention, things like this arise.

And I like it.

On the web when ad space isn’t sold, they plug it into what’s called run of site.

Which means their competitors can bid for that same ad space.

It also means that the number of ad inventory available is vastly over quoted.

Publishers should hugely inflate their value IF when there wasn’t any premium spots available they showed no ads.  It makes them more novel, exclusive and notable.    Thus achieving the purpose of the ad.

• Makers, Chris Andersons latest book, as he does over and over highlighting a new trend starting to snowball. He looks at the world of invention & entrepreneurship blending & how that plays out today.
• A Man and his Ship, a biography of William Francis Gibbs, the Steve Jobs of the shipping era. Follows his life and his mission of making the infamous United States liner a reality.
• Checklist Manifesto, told through medical case studies, implementation of checklists & manuals in a world of complexity, where even the experts cannot remember absolutely everything. Major failure from experts usually a series of simple in-bane mistakes.

And for a few Kindle Singles, I enjoyed:

• Wired McAfee single, talking about his shift to Belize, written just before the recent stream of events.
• A quick summary of Warren Buffetts favourite three books, a nice way to digest wider advice.
• Gutenberg, looking at the man who invented the printing press.

Other notables:

• One Click: Looking at Jeff Bezos and the growth of Amazon. An excellent book which is a must read to know the man behind Amazon but also the early years which formed the company.
• Grouped, looking at how the web has reformulated itself so that your peer groups influence your decision making and moving from a 1-1 relationship with the web.
• NewsJacking, latest David Merman Scott, reminding us of guerrilla marketing in the digital (real time) age. A great prod.
• Stealth of Nations, I have written about it before, but looking at the effect the informal economy has around the world. Marvellous read.