What Google and Wikipedia mean for hyperlinks

I was thinking about the changing way in which I use the internet, and how nowadays the rate at which I'll Firefox-right-click-Google a term or name while reading is several times an article. Google and Wikipedia are such powerful and fast sources of information today, that any link which fails to be very specific, e.g. simply giving definitions or background information, fails to be worthwhile. Links themselves are becoming less strongly distinguished from regular text.

My very modest proposal is that rather than fretting too much over policies about which words in an article should be hyperlinked and when (e.g. only the first occurrence?), we should hyperlink as freely as we want, whenever we think we can do better than a cursory web search, and then (my bright idea) we should downgrade the current colour-highlighted-and-underlined link typeface standard to something more subtle, or in some cases completely undistinguished, to reflect the fact that links aren't quite as significant to the reader as they once were, and to make these hypothetical new link-crazy articles more comfortable to read. (Let's face it: a hyperlink in the middle of a sentence is jarring.)

Update: Done for this blog.

Of course, if we all decide to start linking less generously, this creates a paradox, since Google feeds on links. I suppose we will eventually come to some sort of equilibrium where the usefulness of adding another link is just barely outweighed by the ease of searching on the now-crippled Google.

What is this Semantic Web people are talking about? Is the main idea that hyperlinks now have richer semantic information than their mere existence? If page authors are forced always to put this information in themselves, explicitly or implicitly, then it'll never work. Authoring tools need some hope of figuring out from context what extra things might be meant by a link. Which is to say, they're doing a computation that a sufficiently clever search engine, were it looking over their shoulder, could do as well, the difference being that they're storing the results of incremental, local computations in a way which could be useful for more global algorithms (and also perhaps the behavioral information that never makes it onto the web could give the authoring tool a leg up). Rather than talking out of my ass I should Google the topic, or talk to one of my student friends who know something about it.

Talking out of my ass, mostly for my own benefit, is what I'll be doing on this blog. Time to have tea with Veronica and friends. Bye for now!