Internet People are Real People

There's a curious feeling in non-geeks that "internet people" (as in, people you're only ever likely to meet in a virtual sense, on forums, in chatrooms, and if you're really tech-savvy, some sort of VOIP) aren't "real people". They know this isn't true of course, they're not quite like the characters you meet in single player games, all scripted dialogue and simple action-response AI. But somehow the impression they're less than real persists, they seem to be 2D in some way.

Thats a rather long-winded introduction to the following links, a pair of my favourite recent discoveries: Merlin Mann - how can you not like a guy called Merlin? - who runs 43Folders.com a blog-cum-productivity advice site; and Jonathan Coulton a ex-coder musician who releases his work under a creative commons license, and whose excellent catalogue includes Code Monkey and the credits song for Valve's Portal, you probably have to play the game - and you really should - to fully appreciate the genius of the song though. So here's the guys, (and this is the link) being entirely too human and interesting for "internet people".

Part 1
Part 2

Reading List

One of the many cool features of GoogleReader is the ability to tag posts as public, and share them with your friends. So eye's right for "Sanity Inside", a list of things I've recently found informative, entertaining or thought provoking.

In other news, I'm crazy busy at work (and more than a little stressed), so despite yet another resolution to post more often (although I expect everyone has long since given up reading my blog if they've not added it to some form of RSS reader), I've had neither the time nor energy to do anything even half worth posting about. I noticed a nice view of the Yorkshire Wheel though an arch in the wall on the way home last night, so maybe I'll take a picture on my way home and post that. Not sure how it'll come out, it'll be an interesting experiment!

Trying to reach you

My domain hosts track a whole bunch of interesting stats. For example, Googlebot (the program that creates the Google search index) has visited my blog 5187 times this year. Roughly 0.6% of visitors have been using a Mac, etc.

However, by far the most interesting and amusing stat is that of "Search Keyphrases". Stuff someone has typed into a search engine and ended up at my blog as a result.

Winning the 2007 list by some margin is "they're coming to take me away" with 23 hits. That's slightly worrisome is it not? Maybe apt, but also worrisome. There are 17 other hits with variations on this phrase.

Other amusing phrases that have ended up here (Don't ask how, but no doubt repeating them here will draw more people with crazy searches to my blog) are

"magazine for the black men" err.. what?
"female bbc newscasters" I don't know.. I don't want to know.. but some people on the internet have strange fetishes.
"what does ig stand for in google ig" It's "iGoogle" folks.
"rgldm" Eh what? But there's a whole 7 hits for this, maybe it's a special language involving no consonants?

Might be fun to seed by blog with random bizarre phrases and see how long they take to turn up in the search stats. If Googlebot visits me around 20 times a day (considerably more than any other single entity), anything I write will soon appear in the catalogue of all human knowledge that is GoogleSearch.