I read recently that kids who have grown up with the Internet don't go online, they live online. It's an interesting measure of how thoroughly integrated online tools have become for those who've always had them. At a certain point on the learning curve, using online tools becomes a reflex—like flipping a light switch when the room is dark. You don't think about it, you just do it.
How integrated is Internet search in your reflexes? When a new topic comes up, do you look it up online? How about when you first encounter a new company?
John Andrews tells of an interesting result in an example of Googling your customer:
A new customer buying a sample set of a designer at retail, "anonymously" over the Internet is interesting to me. I Googled her. Sure enough, she is a top executive at a competing global brand. So now we have a top executive at a global brand buying one of each for two lines, at full retail, over the web, on a private credit card, to be delivered to an address that (when Googled) is actually associated (in Google) with that global brand. Huh.That's an e-commerce example, so it involves some data you won't normally have, but you see how how curiosity and search led to an interesting discovery? There's so much more to be learned. The key ingredients are a search engine and some curiosity. The key is what you do with the results of a search. Many interesting questions are answered by pursuing what you learn in successive searches.
It works for links and tags, too. A tag on an interesting article leads to an interesting person leads to a link to another interesting article by another interesting person...
Curiosity may kill cats, but it's a powerful tool in people.
