In today's Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg weighs in on AutoLink.
An excerpt.
"What if you had worked hard to design a Web page, carefully placing links just where you wanted them and carefully selecting the Web destinations to which those links led? And then, what if a company with great power on the Web started adding its own links to your page, drawing visitors away from your page to other sites of its own choosing?"
And he goes on to suggest a solution.
"A compromise is easy to imagine. Instead of adding links to a page, Google could limit the feature to the drop-down list of information it already creates."
My comments.
It seems that Mossberg has been saying the same things to Google that I have. I'm glad to hear, based on his column, that Google is considering a redesign for AutoLink. For what it's worth, if they changed to use only a drop down menu listing all the places they can take the user from the page, instead of marking up the page itself, I would turn from a critic to a supporter. I want the features, I like it when computers do things for me, but its design was too costly for authors and publishers. In a drop-down there would be no confusion about where the new links came from, and which were the new links, they would emanate from a space clearly marked as being Google's, instead of appearing to come from the author of the page.
# Posted by Dave Winer on 3/10/05; 7:07:03 AM - --
