So, in a determined effort not to become one of those stats, I thought I’d update it today with my to do list so that when I am reclining on a beach (in winter) in Queensland in a couple of months, I can look back here and see why I needed a break!

Here we go – between now and June 26th:

• phone the design agency to see when they want me to start

• land the first phase of a big site refresh project at work – new global navigation and stuff, folks

• line up a couple of web agencies in Sydney to work with on a site rebuild

• do the paperwork for the local fete which I am organising for September – and line up events and entertainers etc

• finish painting the front of the house

• try and get another new idea for londonforfree off the ground

• plan my trip to Oz – internal flights and so on

• finish Grown Up Digital and become an active member of the twittersphere again

Will I get it all done before the end of June??? Probably, hopefully…… then I will definitely need a nice break in Oz

I’ve been thinking for a while about getting a new phone so I can check out all the mobile apps available. But after posting about it on Facebook, I realise the choice is staggering.

Now I really don’t need an iPhone as all I would use it for are the mobile apps. And I’m a big google fan. So I’ve decided to wait until a cool new phone using the Android platform becomes available and more apps get launched for it.

In the meantime, I’ve opted for a dongle with 3 network – bargain at £90 for 12 months “unlimited” access. Not exactly mobile apps but mobile web using my laptop . Haven’t tried it out yet – might take it to starbucks one day soon and give it a whirl.

This week has been amazing for London for Free. The number of visitors in the past month has now exceeded 21,000 and adsense revenue for Feb has jumped 30% on January.  And we do absolutely zero paid advertising.

The site is now ranking top of results for a number of google searches around “London”, so that would help. It even beats commercial sites about London. e.g. for “London walks” I rank number 1, above “walks.com” and others.

So I’ve been thinking of ways of boosting the site’s numbers even more and I’ve now set up a twitter account for London for Free, where I will try to post daily info and links to free stuff. Its also another way of learning more about how twitter can be used for business purposes.

This week I also discovered an excellent plug-in for Outlook called xobni. Can’t rave enough about it – it brings all your LinkedIn and Facebook contacts and statuses into the outlook client so you can see info about people as you read emails from them. It also enables you to integrate hotmail and gmail accounts so you can check them all from outlook. An excellent plug-in.

Lastly, I’ve bought two books recently which look very interesting.

Click and Grown up Digital.

I’ll post reviews of them once I’ve read them.

He sums up the dilemma currently facing organisations.

He suggests that work = fun when you are able to choose where, when and how to work and you have the right organisational structures and toolsets (mostly web 2.0 tools) in place to support that choice. And when you have challenging problems to solve and can work collaboratively with whoever you need to work with to get the job done, and share common goals and achievements.

The crucial point about this is that the new generation of workers (“net-geners”) coming through expect that type of working environment to be the norm. Organisations that don’t sit up and take notice of the needs of their future workforce, which have or are growing up with the web, are going to find challenging times ahead.

From the article:

It’s a case of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object. The net-geners arrive at work, eager to use their social networking tools to collaborate and create and contribute to the organisation. However, they are shocked to find technological tools more primitive than the ones used in school. The organisation still thinks the net is about websites presenting information, rather than a Web 2.0 collaboration platform. Then the organisation bans Facebook at the office because it suspects net-geners are chatting with friends and throwing digital snowballs when they should be working – thus depriving net-geners of their link to friends, to fun, to colleagues. Pretty soon, they head for the exit.

His article was inspiring.