Alex Pooley's Blog

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Scientist at work in the lab

Sergey Brin has started a personal blog and in his first post he discusses the discovery of his greater than average likelihood of developing Parkinson’s disease. Despite the frank and sober tone of his post, I couldn’t help but giggle when I came across this paragraph towards the end…

This leaves me in a rather unique position. I know early in my life something I am substantially predisposed to. I now have the opportunity to adjust my life to reduce those odds (e.g. there is evidence that exercise may be protective against Parkinson’s). I also have the opportunity to perform and support research into this disease long before it may affect me. And, regardless of my own health it can help my family members as well as others.

I wish I had enough cash to fund my own research in to whatever genetic diseases I may have a predisposition too. Alas, I do not. For now I’ll just keep my head in the sand and avoid handing over a sample of my DNA to a scientific clairvoyant.

I’m not sure how much has been said about this already, but if you haven’t heard Google are now publishing a frequently updated list of popular search terms. This is superseding their weekly Zeitgeist. You can find Google’s announcement here, and the top 100 query resource here:

http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends

This news will probably excite the IM and SEO readers of this blog. If this is you, then you may also be interested in Neilsen Blogmetrics’ BlogPulse resource.

Maybe this information is not exciting to you. How about a couple of dancing giraffes?

Metareality is a word I made up to describe a layer more abstract than reality. In a game of poker, reality is the cards that your opponents are actually holding. Metareality is the cards that they could be holding based on the cards visible and the bets placed.

As obscure as the introduction to this post may sound, I think many readers of this blog will be familiar with what I am talking about. I find reality pretty boring. It’s so dimensionless. Metareality allows us to make logical leaps between what is real, and what could be real. It also allows us to lock ourselves away and play dungeons and dragons for 12 hours a day, entirely detached from reality.

A few months ago, I started looking at how I spent my time in reality, and in metareality. Reality for me was associated with things like driving, talking to people, pouring cereal. The bulk of my day, spent behind the computer designing and developing, was metareality time - 12+ hours a day. No wonder I felt increasingly detached.

Strangely, keyword research services are what brought me back to reality. Sure, I could speculate about what people are searching for in search engines, orrrr, I could just find out what keywords people are really searching for by indirectly mining real life logged data. What the hell was I doing? Reality is where the game is played. You can scribble on whiteboards and run over possible plays all you like, but until you step in to reality you’re not even in the game.

These days I follow the trail of reality, and then make logical leaps based on that. A year ago I worked the other way around, I followed logical trails, and then back fit to reality. That’s an extremely subtle, but very important difference.