Google Gets Away With What Microsoft Couldn't

FreshlyShornBalls writes "WebProNews is reporting that Google's new beta toolbar apparently sports an "AutoLink" feature which appends hyperlinks to existing content. These hyperlinks, of course, point to their services, such as maps for addresses, isdn numbers for books, etc. Sounds an awful lot like Microsoft's "Smart Tags"." Update by J : ... except that Microsoft's proposal was in the monopoly browser while Google's software is a third-party add-on, and Microsoft's was (originally) on by default while Google's is a button to click.

Comments

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[ari_j]

I'm not going to paste it. But I am going to point something out - people (myself often included) complain about the quality of writing and editing here on Slashdot, but evidently this site isn't alone. From the article:

For example, say your browsing a web page with numerous addresses on it. AutoLink will turn each of those addresses into direct links to the Google Maps database.

That's a part of the article quoting someone else, though, so here is something written directly by the actual article author (who has "nearly 15 years of ... journalism and communications experience" and should know better):

In addition to addresses, it will also add links for ISBNs, package tracking numbers, and vehicle identification numbers. This all has Greg Linden a bit spooked. I agree. How come nobody is crying foul here? Remember all the heat Microsoft took over its planned Smart Tags feature a few years ago? Gary eludes to it, but I think that there should be more discussion here.

Why don't journalists and communications people have to learn the language they're communicating in before being given jobs or keeping jobs for 15 years? Imagine if you walked into a job interview for a position writing Java code and couldn't answer what the difference is between while and if ... you would not walk out with a job offer. The writing professions should be held to no less a standard, but we're letting them get away with it. Why?

N.B. for the people who haven't spotted what's wrong, either because English is a second language or because they are fellow victims of the educational system that produced this article's author.. "Your" is the second-person possessive, whereas "you're" is the correct spelling of the homophone that means "you are," the intended meaning here. I am willing to let contractions slide in journalism, but at least spell them correctly. The "each"/"links" problem is a parallelism thing - the meaning inherent in the way it is worded is that each address will be turned into more than one link, whereas the intended meaning was probably that "AutoLink will turn each of those addresses into a direct link to the Google Maps database." Finally, "to elude" has a meaning similar to "to evade." The word intended here is "allude," meaning "to make an indirect reference." Both come from the same Latin root, ludere, but the difference between prefixing with e and with ad is quite significant.