The Longest Now


Wikipedia tipping point
Tuesday June 28th 2005, 5:01 am
Filed under: %a la mod

I’ve been waiting for this for
a long time.  Today, it finally happened.  I was searching
for a bit of esoterica which I wouldn’t know how to look up in any
reference work; not a dictionary or an encyclopedia or even a polished
usage guide.

I entered a pair of words into Google, expecting to find a throw-away
comment about it on the third page of  results; enough to satisfy
my curiosity.  And there it was
— the top hit, a Wikipedia page (a discussion page at that), with
exactly what I was looking for.  In gorey detail.  It was as
though I had reached effortlessly into the collective subconscious and pulled out, not just what I had verbalized, but what I had been thinking.

Every other hit for the pair was one of those wordlists that so often foil googlewhacking.
For those of you who are curious, one /does/ sometimes put a diacritic over double-e’s, in early-20th century and older English.

I hope all those silly futurists were wrong about networks of
information being able to take on a life of their own. 

In other
news, John Perry Barlow and all those Signal or Noise lawyers were
right about Grokster.  I wonder if they are content with the
result…..


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