The Flywheel

New ways to spend your new money

I was reading some days back that the airline industry is courting trouble because of the amount of frequent flyer miles accumulated by passengers. According to The Economist, the total value of frequent flyer miles still to be redeemed exceeds the total amount of money in circulation in US & Europe!

By the end of 2004 almost 14 trillion frequent-flyer miles had, by our estimate (updating figures from webflyer.com), been accumulated worldwide. But what is a mile worth? Airlines sell them to credit-card firms at an average of just under 2 cents a mile; their value when used to buy a ticket or to upgrade to business class can be anywhere between 1 cent and over 10 cents per mile. Using the mid-point of this range means that the global stock of frequent-flyer miles is now worth over $700 billion, more than all the dollar notes and coins at large. Pedants will complain that we have ignored dollars sitting in bank accounts, but after a couple of free in-flight gin-and-tonics, most frequent-flyers care little about the difference between M0 (the narrowest measure of the supply of miles, or rather, money) and M3.

Sounds like another disaster in waiting for airlines right? Not if this new business system takes off (pun unintended).

Evan Demestihas, a physician who runs a medical company in Atlanta, had always wanted to slip the surly bonds of earth and get out into space, but it looked for a long time as if his abundant business travels on commercial airliners would be the closest he would come. Then came an unexpected opportunity — thanks to those very trips.

In July, he traveled to Star City,   Russia, just outside Moscow, for a ride on a MIG fighter to an altitude of 80,000 feet, about 15 miles up. Looking down from a black sky at the curve of the earth, he marveled at how thin the atmosphere, a band of hazy blue, really looked. He was up there with the pilots who travel higher above the planet than anyone but astronauts.

"That day was all mine," he said.

And instead of paying the full fare of $18,995, he spent $8,000 — and 275,000 frequent-flier miles.

Do the math. By offering this kind of adventure trips, the outstanding stock of unredeemed miles can easily be handled.

Well maybe not so easily (given airlines tendency to attract trouble)…but nevertheless possible.

Clumping & Bridging - A self scan of most visited blogs

I posted quite a long note yesterday on turnarounds. After seeing that I got precisely zero visitors on my blog, I remarked to someone that what I write must be very specific and must be interesting only to a very small set of people. But then as I was visiting some of my favourite blogs, something struck me. Actually, these are 2 questions:

1. Out of the people who visit, read and comment on any given blog, how many are bloggers?
2. If, as I suspect, most of them are bloggers, what is the central theme of their blog?

I believe the answers to above two questions would be very instructive. For one thing, I don't think only bloggers visit blogs like Boing Boing or InstaPundit. But when it comes to specific topics like business, economics etc. does anyone have a reader base which is widely spread in terms of interests? Or do you have a reader base most of which is fellow bloggers talking about the same topic but with a different perspective? On top of that, when it comes to blogs focusing on business or some other specific, narrow interests, can we expect a lot of readers who do not blog?

My blog does not get a lot of visitors; in fact on a good day, I get about 10 unique visitors. So I cannot do this experiment myself. Instead, I scanned my bookmarks folder for the blogs I visit regularly. And lo and behold, majority of the blogs I visit are business blogs or work blogs. Out of the 24 regular blogs that I visit, 18 are business blogs, 2 are economics, 3 are news analysis and current affairs and only 1 on history! Talk about clumping or clustering of bloggers!

On the other side, I do visit 3 blogs which have nothing to do with my work or personal life, but are nevertheless of interest to me. I think this is where I play the bridging role however weak it may be.

If you leave aside the point that I have a strong bias to complain about this, how valid are my conclusions? If all the various groups of bloggers are clustering together based on their blogging topic, how does a good, new (ahem!) blog gets found and disseminated? I am interested in hearing more about your experiences in finding a new blog that has a unique, relevant take on a topic that is not central to your blog. If you did run into such a blog and watched it grow in readership, how was it done?

My opinion is this where bridges play a critical role. If you think of each special topic as an island, then we need bridges or ferry men who can lead people across and give them the opportunity to see new, wondrous places in the world. Have any of you played such a role? If so, what was your experience? How much of my conclusions or hypothesis are justifiable based on your experience?

Need a Gmail....please?

These days every blog I visit, skim or read seems to have just ran out of Gmail invites :-(. This is such a bummer. Come to think of it, 2 weeks back I had a lovely life and now it all seems so pointless!

Greed is energizing! If not for my covetousness, I probably would not have posted today at all :-)

Update(16th Feb): Well, this particular story has a happy ending! I have already signed up for gmail (as you can see from my email id on this blog) and now have the opportunity to pay this forward.  If you need a gmail account, drop me a mail or a comment here with your first name, last name and email id.

Synchronicity ? or Eventanche?

The socially selective networker

This is really uncanny! For the past few days I kept running into articles about LinkedIn service which enables people to network elegantly and selectively. I first came across this service from WorkingSmart blog and then the number of hits on this concept kept piling up continuously. So much so that today I signed up, sent out a few invitations and a few requests. Some time later, I happen to visit one of my preferred blogs SlackerManager and not only do i see a post on social networking, LinkedIn, but I also see that he mentions my blog in his sidebar!

Seriously scary piling up of coincidences! or is this synchronicity? I am sure there is a name for this kind of phenomenon as I am sure a lot of you out there had similar experiences.

In case there is no word for this, I propose to call such phenomenon “eventanche” .

Eventanche – (n) a coming together of widely separated events across time & space involving few actors in a very short time.