Yes, well, this is not what
I had in mind when I said an Everything autolinker would be cool.
First, JeffMagnus seems to be off in geek mode: sure it's cool to have a Perl script modifying Everything, but only geeks would stop there; normal people would wonder whether it would serve any useful purpose, before even implementing the darn thing. eric+'s E2 node autolinker in Perl is useful and actually helps to improve Everything.
Second, if you happen to find an interesting way to add to or change the Everything content in a systematic way, it would be much cooler to implement this as a view rather than an update. With a view, you'd have virtual nodes
to reflect the modification you have in mind,
recomputed on the fly as soon as anybody visits them. This would create an alternative browsing mode for Everything,
without affecting the actual content.
Actually I think the best way to implement this is as a rewriting webproxy for Everything. That way people can play with the feature; if it's interesting enough, it can
always be added to the Everything system later.
An obvious application of this idea is alternative GUIs for Everything. But the reason I mention it here is autolinking. It would be interesting to have an Everything mode in which all links are automatic: every phrase that is a valid description would be a link wherever it occurs. With the vast amount of descriptions Everything has now I think this would be very useful: as a noder I find it very helpful to know about related descriptions before I write one of my own, and I think this would help me find them.
Saige takes this idea one step further, but it's important to do these things one step at a time. If I ever get around to implementing it I'll provide the URL here.