Five Ideas That Matter

The 20.00 hours Aer Lingus out of Cork to London Heathrow this evening had to execute an emergency procedure when it turned out there was an airplane on the runway as the plane – my plane – neared completion of its descent and prepared to land.

Just prior to touchdown, I mean as we were thinking about putting our mobiles back on, the plane suddenly veered upwards and climbed rapidly into the clouds. The plane was full and I’m sure, like me, people were thinking what the f***. Did we lose the landing gear? Is there something wrong with the plane?

We leveled off and the engines went quiet…. I was actually thinking – well if we couldn’t land then, how will we land at all? We DO have to go back down sooner or later.

After a few minutes the pilot announced that air traffic control had brought the flight down too close to the plane in front which had not yet cleared the runway.

Our plane circled for a further ten minutes and then came in to land safely. How close was that? I don’t suppose we’ll find out. Perhaps the most amazing thing was how we all filed off the plane without mentioning it – like it happens every day! Or maybe we were so relieved that the pilot was telling us we will be able to land anyway.

It was a couple of hours – when I got to my hotel – that I started to think, well that was a plane and there were probably 180 people on it, and we came all the way down and suddenly started climbing all the way back up again…..Quick apology from the pilot and down we went again.

Is there going to be an inquiry? Was an air traffic controller tired? Too tired? Was the pilot too eager to get down? Is it an officical incident? Nobody so far seems to have said anything about it. It wasn’t mentioned on the news this evening. I dunno does it constitute an emergency?

Search tools are not infallible, as anyone can testify who has taken content metrics sourced from Google, Technorati or their peers at face value, and been burnt. Here is some evidence, from a recent internal research project.

Chart 1 plots the number of results reported by Google Blog Search in a simple search string, banded by month using the advanced search interface.

Chart 2 plots the same results if you throw away the number of results reported by Google, and count actual results by hand.

There is a critical issue here for metatrend analysis – the old business cliche of garbage in, garbage out applies: if data are junk, no valuable insights will be created. Researchers working within social media need to understand the limitations of the tools that they use, and incorporate an effective validation process into their workflow.

A Metatrend method paper is in draft form, so more on the implications of accuracy and reliability in tool selection later.