Thoughts on the reading..
I found Andy Clark's chapter on Global Swarming to be interesting. It is interesting how links between webpages, rather than just the content itself is being used in search engines and so forth. Also, I found interesting the concept of "highlighting" much used areas, and the problem that this could pose as people are drawn a less desirable area, which was perhaps highlighted by mistake after a few random hits. Maybe a bunch of people were instructed to go there for a college course, as an example of a bad source of information. They are told to pay particular attention to a very misleading detail. Other people might then go there for the mere reason that the site, particularly the misleading detail, are indeed highlighted. These new people thus make the area remain highlighted and possibly even cause it to obtain some greater level of highlightedness. This pattern follows the real life patterns of movies or books that are not very good, but get ranked highly on a list because of some sort of initial hype. Then people who do not examine closely, perhaps do not read reviews, might go to the movie or buy the book based merely on its position on a list, only to be disappointed, but in the same time having strengthened its ranking. Perhaps, some sort of ranking devised in the viewing of a website, etc, of a likeminded person, as we saw in the Amazon example of book recommendations would be better suited than the highlighting method..