On New Year’s Day 2007, a Boeing 737 carrying 102 people vanished off the coast of Sulawesi, Indonesia. No distress signal had been received and no wreckage could be found. In an echo of the TV show Lost, the plane and its passengers and crew seemed to have disappeared without trace. What had happened to Adam Air Flight 574?

This is a feature I wrote at the time for the Sunday Herald Magazine. You can read a text-only version online, or view it with photos as a PDF.

The missing 737-400 was operated by short-haul carrier Adam Air, and was one of hundreds of planes that regularly hop between the Indonesian islands. Flight 574 left Surabaya, on the north coast of Java and around 150 miles west of Bali, at 12.55 local time. It was bound for Manado, a coastal resort on the northern tip of Sulawesi. Manado is just over 1000 miles north-east of Surabaya, across the Java Sea and Makassar Strait, and over Sulawesi’s mountains and jungles and the equatorial line. On board for the two-hour flight were 91 adults, seven children and four infants. Read more.

Wikipedia map showing Flight 574's route

Features Lost, Plane Crash

TV Ad Music is a website that was set up in 2001 to help users identify the music tracks used in their favourite UK TV adverts. It has become reasonably popular and valued, and last week I relaunched it in a new easier-to-use format. Have a gander at the new version here.

With PVRs and online streaming changing the way we watch TV, advertisers are having to try harder than ever to make sure we don’t skip through ad breaks. As of today, the three most popular ads on the website are the Cabury’s Dairy Milk kids with their Eyebrow Dance (soundtracked by 80s electro tune Don’t Stop The Rock by Freestyle), and the VW Golf Beating Yourself martial arts ad (complete with fairly obscure German electronica from Jeans Team), and a National Lottery Streakers ad (which most definately doesn’t star Noah Wyle out of ER).

Whatever you think of the use of music in adverts, they are both eyecatching little films that defy the use of the ad skip button.

You can watch hundreds of ads and listen to and download tracks directly from the website, and the site is updated with new ads regularly. You can comment on any of the ads, and there’s also a forum you can get involved in. Or you can just watch the Eyebrow Dance ad over and over again…

Music, Websites TV Ad Music

Website flipping is the online trend of buying up underdeveloped sites, fixing them up, and selling them on for a profit. Here’s a piece I wrote for The Guardian in September. With the credit crunch biting, online property development certainly seems more attractive than getting involved with bricks and mortar.

Who’d be a property developer nowadays? The answer: people who develop online properties – rather than physical ones – by snapping up undeveloped sites in a practice known as website flipping. The principle is exactly the same as that of property development: flippers fix up the undeveloped sites and sell them for a profit. As with property development, it’s all about adding value. In property, adding value may mean converting a loft. Online, it means increasing visitor traffic and improving website revenue. Read more here.

As a update to the story, about a month later Bryan Clark sold his website siteflipu.com, plus blogflippingblueprint.com, for $32,500 to an investor, who in turn listed the websites for sale again after a couple of weeks.

Technology The Guardian, Website Flipping