As part of my 2007 year in review I've determined that this blog deserves more readers so I've decided to do some self-promotion. Evidentially if people don't know about you they cannot read you. As part of this campaign I decided to self nominate me to the Irish Blog Awards in the Personal Blog Category.

Where do you come in? Easy, in nominating me. Just click on this link and fill in the name and my blog in the personal blog category with a short description of why. That's it. You only need to nominate a minimum of 1 blog so don't be scared at the length of the form.

This is who I nominated for in the other categories:-
Best blog: Twenty Major
Best Technology blog: Semantic Bits
Best Food blog: The humble housewife

To reflect the start of my two year research project in Information Visualization, Social Networks and the Airline Industry I'm adding 3 new categories to the blog. The first section on Information Visualisation will contain examples of interesting graphical displays of information to help communicate better (see the Information Aesthetics site for some examples).

Source: NY Times Information Graphic Examples - Matthew Ericson

The social networks section will contain posts on social relations. The essence of social networks is the focus on relationships between entities (e.g. people, countries), rather than the individual characteristics of that entity. Nowadays social networks are commonly associated with websites like Facebook and Myspace, which are examples of social network services. These services provide an accessible way for social scientists to examine the social networks of people who use these services.

The third area of this project is the airline business. Instead of starting a section on the airline business itself this section will contain general airline travel tips.

Since the contents of these sections are going to be a bit on the geeky side, posts in these sections are going to be published in the technology and travel section of mindspill.

I'm leaving for my September "holiday" two days earlier. I managed to combine some work I've got to do in the dot with my personal holiday. This way I'm hoping to keep my free time my own and not let work creep in as happened before. Making an extra buck doesn't hurt either.

Blog News: I've created a new section for in the inbox this week posts.

I've updated the layout of the tech section slightly. It was done in a bit of a rush because I was fed up with the old layout. I think I should do something better with the title which isn't really convincing. Any opinions / suggestions on the new layout?

Before

After

Today I received my first birthday present, 3 days in advance. It definitely helped start the day on the right foot and with a smile especially when I saw the card with the cat fish. To celebrate the postcard I've added a cats category to the blog.

Got three CDs of bands I’ve been listening to a lot recently. Pain – Dancing with the dead, Finntroll – Ur Jordens Djup and Ajattara – Tyhjyys. Great stuff and most welcoming. The Finnish theme of the bands gives off the sender doesn’t it. Thanks!

If you were redirected here from an "elephant penis" or any other related "animal sex" search you can find what you're looking for here!

Alexa, the website popularity tracking providers let you create these t-shirts. Oh, I'm so tempted to get one, I like the 0.000045% popularity on the web. It's hilariously pathetic.

At last I've finished uploading and writing up the Venezuela photos. There are a couple of galleries for each different place I've been to. Check them out in the travel section.

I've gained some blogging momentum and I'm about to start 2 new series. The first series is "Read Today" and it'll contain a number of interesting quotations read on the day. Most probably this will be more a tech type of thing because that's making up most of my reading at present but anyway the tech section needs some ass-kicking so that's a good way to revive it.

The second series is "By E-mail this week". These are basically selected snippets of mail from the huge mass of rubbish I receive. Should be good fun, we'll see how it goes.

Also, I've been catching up with uploading the Venezuela photos. I'm almost finished, so if I keep this updating rate I'll probably be ready soon. Check out the travel section for this.

For the Venezuela trip travelogue I'm going to keep the amount of bla bla to a minimum and use more photos and some video to document the salient points of the holiday. Hopefully this will give a general idea about Venezuela in a simple clear way without having to spend an hour reading detailed accounts of everything I've done in these two weeks.

If anybody is planning a trip to Venezuela or is interested in more information just e-mail me and I'll be more than happy to help.

The main articles are going to be posted only to the travel section of mindspill. I'll post a link to the each new post in the main blog as a notification that new content has been added. The target is to post a new update every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

• For the next 31 days I'm going to write a technology related tip
• The tip has to be less than 100 words, brief and straight to the point.
• By the 17th of November there must be 31 tips
• The aim of this tip a day is to learn a small thing every day and revive the technology section of the blog
• All these tips will be posted in the technology section.
• Will I manage this? The bet is on …

I've have now split the blog into three different parts.

1. Personal Blog
2. Technology Section
3. Travel Section

This means that from now on the main blog isn't going to have any rants on how I spent my break squashing XHTML bugs or what a beautiful country Ecuador is. There are two boxes on the left hand side that show the latest posts in these respective categories so those inclined can still visit them.

I've moved these two sections out of the main section to increase the individuality of the distinct parts. I don't know whether this idea is going to work out for the long term but at least for the time being I'm going to try this experiment. If you have any feedback then it's more than welcome.