"Google novel aura"

Interesting interview of William Gibson on Amazon. An excerpt that I found pertinent:

"Amazon.com: How do you research? If you want to write about, say, GPS, like you do in your new book, do you actively research it and seek out experts, or do you just perceive what's out there and make it your own?

Gibson: Well, I google it and get it wrong [laughter]. Or if I'm lucky, Cory Doctorow tells me I'm wrong but gives me a good fix for it. One of the things I discovered while I was writing Pattern Recognition is that I now think that any contemporary novel today has a kind of Google novel aura around it, where somebody's going to google everything in the text. So people--and this happened to me with Pattern Recognition--would find my footprints so to speak: well, he got this from here, and this information is on this site."

Why do I blog this? writings has always been a matter of structuring and restructuring ideas, phrasing and content but it seems that with tools such as google there is a way to find "footprints" (traces of people in a "textual space" here). IT reminds me of some french sci-fi authors who started his book by quoting his "sources" such as scientific papers, anthropological and philosophical books. What was fun was to read the book from that perspective and see how these ideas were melted into the book, a sort of elaborated collage.