The Google Auto Linker:

The Google Auto Linker is a tool Philipp Lenssen created that takes your blog post and adds links automatically. It does this by searching Google for the longest phrases in your post and the ones that return a significant number of hits will get turned into a link. Good idea. It needs work though, since the links are not necessarily at all relevant to the post itself just because the same phrase exists in both places. It would be great if it could be improved to be more context-sensitive, or rather than look for the longest phrases it can find elsewhere, it focused on key phrases that are less common, regardless of length.

This idea brings us closer to what I see as being the future of the web - where we are able to connect instantly with like-minded people and figure out if things we've thought about have ever been thought of before. Philipp talks about this in his post, something I've talked about before as well. As the web continues to evolve, we do really become parts of a worldwide brain, the internet becoming an extension of our minds.

Over time we gain the ability to verify, fact-check, and refine our thoughts, and less and less of our thinking is based on assumptions and intuition. With the internet as an everpresent connection to the entire world of ideas, we can no longer make assumptions knowing that we are unlikely to be proven wrong. Our choice becomes one between reserving judgment or jumping on Google and looking it up.

Does this perhaps lead to a society where people are better at reserving judgment and make fewer incorrect assumptions about how the world works?

And, does this phenomenon potentially reverse into the inability to make judgments? Does having the ability to verify our worldview lead to a loss of intuition?

It is interesting how so many blog posts out there (like this one) contain so many questions, and so few answers...

blogging
WebCulture