The 1% number was just a guess, though. So last week I got the guys at my company, Holiday Extras, to run a poll and ask our customers. We run our polls on the "welcome back" email we send to customers, so we know that all of our respondents have just flown back from a holiday.

6.5 million people in the UK flew with a device turned on last year, and not one of those planes fell out of the sky. Last week American Airlines chucked Alec Baldwin off a plane for leaving his iPad turned on. This week the same American Airlines plans to let pilots (but just pilots) bring iPads into the cockpit. It is time for this bizarre and unevidenced hypocrisy to come to an end. Millions of planes a year take off and land without incident even when people leave their devices turned on. It is apparently safe for the pilots to have them in the cockpit. If anyone has a scrap of evidence that phones and computers really do intefere with plane instruments then of course safety means we should keep them turned off. But it is perfectly obvious that no such evidence has ever been found.

My own frustration shoping online is with ad retargeting.

It comes back to the delusion of most website owners, that when people are online they are visiting your site. People are not visiting your site. They are on the web. If they don't buy the coat you're selling, it's not because they haven't been chased around the Guardian website by enough photos of the damned thing. It's because they bought another coat from someone else who was a click or two away. Just saying.

(Picture, let's face it, stolen from here)

There's a couple of possible solutions to this, but the one that strikes me as most obviously achievable without the invention of any new technology is for us all to agree to a minor conspiracy.

Half the fun of watching scheduled TV is the accompanying Tweets. But without a bit of coordination that bit of fun forces us to watch the damned ads or risk spoilers and irrelevance. So let's just agree to watch everything ten minutes after it starts, stick up a hashtag like #apprentice+10 or #xfactor+10 and we can go back to ad-skipping (nearly) live TV. 

(Photo by dustinaskins on Flickr)

Both apply the brutally belaboured metaphor of time as money and depict a class of indentured post-industrial serfs slaving away at pointedly mindless tasks for, in Brookerverse, the "merits" (Facebook likes times retweets times pounds) they need to buy everything from toothpaste to ad-skipping, and for the doomed residents of the In Time ghetto literally the minutes and hours they need to keep their hearts beating. Both depict a vast underclass grinding away to support a neofeudal aristocracy (in the one case of bankers, in the other a thinly-disguised Simon Cowell analogue celebrity freak-wrangler). Both offer the same escape routes for their doomed underclass - blind chance, inheritance and gambling.

So far so mind-numbingly obvious. The funny bit is that I paid thirty quid to take my parents to see In Time and we sat through maybe half an hour of ads while watching 15 Million Merits.

The message "you are idiots and slaves" has the potential, at least, to be interesting and provocative. The message "you are idiots and slaves who will pay us ten pounds a seat and sit through half an hour of commercial messages to be told you are idiots and slaves" is meta-absurdist satire. It as if the puppeteer showed Punch the strings, as if Beckett had climbed onto the stage with Didi and Gogo and whispered in their ears that they were characters a play, as if the Queen of hearts on hearing that she and her court were nothing more than a pack of cards had continued as if nothing had changed.

Art that so flagrantly takes the piss out of life - out of its own audience - is a rather wonderful level of satire. I tip my hat to Mr Brooker, and especially for the audacity of saying of his audience, in his recent Q&A "don’t think we did portray them as fucked in the head really". Come now, Mr Brooker. That we are so fucked in the head we will actually pay you money to tell us we are fucked in the head is precisely what you are saying, and the comedy is in the fact that we love you for it.

"You know what's really cool about our culture?" he tweeted. "Oh wait. I can't think of anything."

Hyperbole is hyperbole. But since this is a cultural golden age, I do not like to see the odd bump in the road cause one of our greatest minds to write off the whole thing. Contra Farmville for Dummies, therefore, a handful of points in favour of the culture at the start of the second decade of the third millenium.

2. Multiple media and artforms are at the crest of a twenty-five-year long wave of excellence. Both TV drama and comic books have gone from Twin Peaks and Watchmen in the 80s and early 90s through GBH, the West Wing, the Sopranos, 24, Dr Who, Lost, Mad Men, The Shield and The Wire on the one hand and Arkham Asylum, Sandman, Preacher, Transmetropolitan, the Invisibles, The Boys and the Walking Dead on the other.

3. Right now, the new Tolkien is writing the new Lord of the Rings. We are living as the greatest fantasy epic ever told - George R R Martin's Song of Ice and Fire - comes to life. And that's just the highpoint of a fantasy literature that is the best it has ever been by a country mile - Patrick Rothfuss, Joe Abercrombie, Robin Hobb, Scott Lynch, all writing at the same time. The City and the City, The Scar, The Wind-Up Girl, All My Friends are Superheroes, The Baroque Cycle, Amnesiascope, Nightwatch, The Passage, Anathem, World War Z, Falling out of Cars...in the last ten years humanity has produced some of the greatest stories ever told, and better still all the old ones are still just lying around for anyone who wants to pick them up. 

4. Of course Farmville is nonsense for fools. But computer games ("the only truly original artform of the C20th") that aren't Farmville...well, there we have more cultural highpoints. Azeroth, the game world in which Warcraft is played, is one of the great artworks of the C21st, a vast interactive world of staggering beauty, depth and intricacy. If you've never spent a few hours just visiting and looking around you're missing out as badly as an Englishman who's never bothered to pop down the chunnel to see Mont St Michel or a Texan who's never visited the Grand Canyon. It's right there for the seeing and it's staggering. The peace and simple beauty of Loch Moden at sunset, the vast grandeur of Dalaran, the quiet of the Eversong Woods at dawn, Winterspring and Dun Morogh in the snow...if you haven't already, go and see what the fuss is about. Ditto Skyrim, Eve, even Skies of Arcadia which is now more than a decade old. Every day people are building whole new worlds you can get lost in for a year out of ones and zeroes. And yet the culture is over? No.

5. It has never been easier to create, learn, share knowledge. Wikipedia, yes, so far so obvious and no less a big deal for that. The ecosystem of books created by Amazon Kindle and self-publishing online, by blogging and twitter and even sometimes Facebook has exploded creativity. Sure, it means there's more crap. Most people aren't Shakespeare and so very much of it is the quotidian babble of toast and toothpaste. But I taught myself economics in five years just by reading the odd book and stuff that was lying around on the web and mainly by talking about it in public, right here, until I started making a modicum of sense (quiet at the back). 

Everyone shares their thoughts in public and much of it is nonsense and hardly anyone reads any of it and still every day a million things are created that are profound or heartbreakingly beautiful or just strange and wonderful. The fact that for reasons I cannot fathom they are still churning out episodes of Coronation Street and the X Factor, that Michael Bay call sell movies, that Coldplay are allowed to sing in public and Zynga isn't bankrupt doesn't for one moment detract from any of that. Every day our culture gets richer and deeper and more wonderful. It's only ever a problem of selection.

We've been working to roll out new content on the site - first by going out and actually collecting that content, visiting hotels and car parks and photographing and writing up our experiencs. Second by redesigning the pages that content sits on so it's not just easy for the Google robot to read but engaging for real live humans too.

Four months and one page sounds like a pretty slender return on Holiday Extras' investment, but in fact we've got another 20-30 hotels all visited, photographed and written up ready to go live too.

Photographs by me, words by me (edited by my senior copywriter Sarah), page design by Oak and technical implementation mainly by our SEO team. Plenty more to do and we're going to be redesigning the whole thing again almost immediately but just for the moment...that's what I've been up to. Let me know how you'd make it better.

On Friday Laurie Penny kicked off a debate about misogyny online when she pointed out that for airing her opinions she is regularly subject to threats, abuse and all sorts of hate from anonymous - presumably male - commentators. Many other women have since commented that they have been subject to similar abuse. The fact that women say things apparently drives some men into a violent fury, and many websites give them the option of venting that fury through anonymous trolling.

There are plenty of politically-active hackers floating around, increasingly so since the prominence of Wikileaks and the many successes of Anonymous have shown what motivated people can do to change the world from behind a keyboard. So let's find a few of these guys, the ones who are threatening rape and murder on women for merely speaking their minds - not to pay them back in kind, not to threaten them with the same violence or to publish their addresses so a mob can kick down the door. No, just enough information to write a quick note to their mothers, girlfriends, wives, kids and female friends saying "when he thinks no-one knows it's him, this is what he says online".

Yes, I really am suggesting that we track down the guy who said Laurie Penny should be gang-raped by bankers at knife-point and tell his mum. Because if we found a few of these psychopaths and demonstrated the rather tenuous limits of online anonymity, perhaps the rest of them would think twice before doing it again.

(Photo from benimoto on Flickr)

The full gallery is (was) here, and using a celeb gallery to raise awareness of Occupy Wall Street is funny. Hats off to the guy, who is presumably now looking for a new job.

This is, of course, not quite true.

Last time I bought a house it was valued at about £350k. For insurance purposes it was necessary to find out how much it would cost to rebuild the whole thing from scratch, and that was estimated at about £120k. For not very interesting reasons I looked into what it would cost to buy a bit of the garden next door and got back an estimate of a few tens of thousands, at most. This is, needless to say, a patch of land in central London which in every practical sense is big enough to build another house on. It just so happens that it's a bit of someone's back garden and there is no planning permission - so it's worth little more than the same size patch of land in Yorkshire or the Outer Hebrides.

Do the maths with me. The land qua land was actually worth say £20k. The bricks and mortar were worth £120k. The "house" was worth £35ok. Mostly what I was buying was planning permission. Something a bit short of a quarter of a million quid of it. For the privilege of being allowed to have a house worth £120k on a patch of land worth £20k.

Look at it another way and everything's fine. Anything is worth what the next guy will pay for it: I was willing to fork over £x and the next guy will fork over roughly £x too. Why worry?

I guess I worry because a society or an economy whose members generally hold the majority of their assets in the form of planning permission might not be in such good shape, even if few of them articulate it in quite that way. Bricks and mortar sounds nice and robust. Land sounds solid. The administrative whims of planning functionaries at the local council...not so much. 

(Photo from Woodleywonderworks on Flickr)

My next question is always - who are their competitors? Sure, we could buy this, but what else is out there? Is it any good? Is it better?

Having spent a few years selling software in the City, this question always fascinates me. When you're selling one of half a dozen systems into a small market, you know who your comeptitors are - you bump into them every day, your customers are forever thinking about replacing your system with one or another of theirs and there are competitive pitches going on all the time. But from the point of view of someone buying a system, it's surprisingly easy not to know that one or more of the half dozen options out there even exists. The sales guys at company X aren't going to tell them that company Y has a great piece of kit too; they might ask their competitors what they use but hey, they're competitors and who wants to look clueless in front of competitors?

So I always wonder, when I see a new piece of technology I might want to buy - what else is out there that I've missed? And who is going to tell me?

The answer now, it turns out, is pretty simple. I tweeted that I was looking at Vocus and asked for suggestions. Some of their competitors tweeted me back - companies I was vaguely aware of but didn't know had anything in this space. And now I can assess those systems too. Point being, next time I'm comparing systems to buy I'm going to do this again. And if you're trying to sell something, and you don't have anyone at your company watching the streams for people mentioning your competitors, I'm not going to know you're out there till long after the ink's dry on the contract with the other guy. Social media monitoring matters. It's a sales channel, because it's an effective, convenient and almost miraculously easy buying channel. Everyone needs to keep an eye on their space and not let the opportunities slip by.

Image from berthop on Flickr