Still busy here, with a bit of travelling on my part as well. Flying to Dallas on American Airlines last week, I was suddenly jolted back to the reality of normal airline travel— dear God, have I been that utterly spoiled on Virgin Atlantic?! On AA, the seats were cramped, flights were late, staff was unenthusiastic, and the "$4 for snacks" pitch made me laugh out loud. Actually (true story), I picked up some food at TGI Fridays at DFW and was waiting at the gate when I thought I’d use the restroom before the flight. I asked the AA woman at the counter if I could leave my single-clear-plastic food container there for a minute, and she quite authoritatively told me I wasn’t allowed to and that she’d have to throw it away. Talking to a friend a few minutes later, we joked: "Damn, if this were Virgin, they’d not only hold it for me, but when I got back, they’d ask if I wanted it reheated!" It’s hardly surprising that Virgin Atlantic passengers rave about the airline while American and other airlines stumble their way toward bankruptcy with business-as-usual obliviousness. (I wasn’t even joking when I said the VAA staff at the gate mailed my postcards, etc.)

Also reminded me yet again of why we blog about Branson companies here on BransonBlog.com… With our 1.5 year milestone quickly approaching, our spring cleaning is well underway behind the scenes. We’ve been promising new features on the site forever now, but got caught up in something bigger along the way, and that work will benefit this site shortly. Here are some of the features we’re working on these days…  

• More Branson news! We’ve been hideously bad at keeping up with all of the Branson news out there, and we know some of you Branson fans would be more than happy to help. The biggest feature in the works is a new submission system, integrated with del.icio.us, to help you collect and tag Branson news links here.


• More reference info. A blog is good for chronological news, but not great for looking up reference information. Want a quick biographical overview? Want a list of books about Branson? List of future appearances? Other information? Hopefully the reference area will provide an easy place to find what you’re looking for.


• More analysis. As we’ve discussed before, BransonBlog is a brand blog covering all the news about Sir Richard’s companies, and hopefully providing insightful analysis and commentary as well. Yeah, apparently we haven’t gotten to the "insightful" part yet…   Definitely something to work on in the near future.


• A Frequently Asked Questions page. I’d estimate that 98% of the email we receive could be addressed on a FAQ page, and that’d be a lot more convenient for our readers too.


• A BransonMail Auto-forwarder. Speaking of reader email, we really need a way to channel messages to Sir Richard’s official people. This wasn’t something we initially planned to do, since we’re an unofficial site not at all affiliated with Richard Branson or the Virgin Group companies. That said, since nearly all our reader email involves business proposals, fan mail, and customer support requests, it’d be great to forward that stuff on more easily.


• A "Branson Companies" database. Virgin Records? Not a Branson company (he sold it to EMI). Virgin Radio in the UK? Not a Branson company either. V2? Yep, Branson company, without an obvious Virgin name. It’d be nice to have a convenient system to track all 300+ Branson companies, with user-submitted news about each one.


• A little site design reworking. Nothing major, just a fresh coat of paint to spruce things up, and a new Flickr integration to pull Branson images onto our site here as well.

Probably other stuff too, but that’s about all I can think of offhand. What else would you like to see here? What other features would make this site useful to both long-time readers and to first-time visitors finding us via search engines? Have other suggestions? Just drop us an email at editors @ the site. Thanks!