Is Google the Borg?

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Website content publishers, resistance is futile, your content will be assimilated and become part of the collective, prepare to surrender.

I know some of you out there don’t understand what all the fuss is about, but if Google gets away with this, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. In fact in today’s Washington Post there is an article about the autolink feature. It seems Google is already working on adding new autolinks:

Mayer confirmed that more auto-links are in the works, probably using other numbers you can already type into Google’s query box to get special results. Those include telephone area codes, which link to maps of covered regions, and UPC or bar codes, which retrieve links to product descriptions.

To their credit Google is at least considering changing the destination links, giving you more options, and different visual clues:

To make clearer how it works, Google is studying possible changes to how new links are presented and to the menu where they are activated.

The visual cues it uses to signal where links have been added seem too subtle — three tiny bubbles appear when you mouse over a link. Otherwise, they look like regular hyperlinks.

However giving more options is not the crux of the problem, the problem is putting the links in places they weren’t in the first place. It’s a matter of respect for the contents creator. It’s like colorizing old black and white movies, it’s an abuse of technology, and just plain wrong.

In case you boys down at the Googleplex are in need of some reading material this weekend here’s a prelinked book you may want to check out this weekend ISBN:0671723650

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