SouthernFriedMind.com - Scoble vs. Doctorow (from: PubSub: Scoble)
http://www.southernfriedmind.com/2005/03/21/scoble-vs-doctorow/
Weblog: SouthernFriedMind.comSource: Scoble vs. Doctorow
Link: http://www.southernfriedmind.com/2005/03/21/scoble-vs-doctorow/
I just listened to part one of “Sound Policy” with Denise Howell featuring Robert Scoble, Cory Doctorow, and Marty Schwimmer talking about Google’s autolink.
As it was finishing I noticed Scoble’s post :
By the way, debating with Cory is a very intense experience. Listening to the conversation it’s pretty clear he beat me in debating skills.
Listening to those two debate was a fairly intense experience itself. What was pretty clear to me was that Doctorow beat Scoble in talking over people, anyway. Doctorow dominated the conversation if not on its merits then certainly by out talking everybody else.
The corner Scoble was in is that the true evil of Autolink is not what it does today, but what it could end up doing tomorrow. What happens when Google decides that when you want to go to Rush Limbaugh’s site you should be linked to Air America’s instead? Or vice versa? Or when Google decides that instead of the EFF site they’ll send you to the RIAA site? It’s not a big stretch that once Autolink becomes an accepted standard that it goes from linking only unlinked content to changing existing links in the content to whatever Google, or the highest bidder wants it to be. Do you trust Google, not to do it?