Home, online, and freshly inspired…

Well, you’ll be glad to know I’m home and back online after my break, despite the fun on flying back to the UK during some strong winds – I’m sure at one point the plane was trying to land sideways!

I had a really good time introducing my son to his extended family, and having my first offline break of more than a couple of days in about as long as I can remember – I had the occasional twinge, but aside from uploading pictures to Flickr, I only logged in once to check my emails!

Instead I wrote down any ideas and inspiration in a storage device which I believe is called a ‘notebook’, made of paper, and using a stylus which dispensed ink onto the paper, thus preserving the content. And I even had the chance to releax and read something called a ‘book’.

In a rush for the plane, and experiencing physically shopping for something to read for the first time in ages, I ended up with Richard Branson’s Business Stripped Bare: Adventures of a Global Entrepreneur on a bit of a whim, and I’m glad I did. I’d never spent much time considering the Virgin brands until now, and it turns out they’re an excellent case study for many of the principles the social media world are espousing. And considering Brand has build 8 billion-dollar companies from scratch, there’s some pretty persuasive proof!

And on the book topic, while I was out of the country, my former colleague Dave Cushman has published a collection of his white papers of social networking, media, and communities via Lulu, with any money going to charity. See more on The Power of the Network, here.

Anyhoo, the entire family is suffering with various strains of the traditional ‘return from holiday with an illness’ which seems to happen so much, including it’s most junior member. Plus I’ve got a few hundred emails to filter, 1000+ RSS items to clear, and various other things to update, upload and file – including some better sorting and tagging of my Flickr photos. I’ve finally invested in a Pro account, so I should really make more use of it. Maybe the final excuse I need to start upgrading my travelling kit with a smart phone with a decent camera?

I’ll start going through ideas, news, and picking out some of the most relevant Branson examples over the next couple of days as I get back up to speed. And in the meantime I’ll be continuing to learn how hard it is to administer a syringe full of medicine into a baby’s mouth without seeing the contents end up everywhere but inside the baby!

And now one last pic to retain the feeling of relaxation you get in a small town in Sweden when everyone else is at work – and it’s not exactly busy during rush hour!