Tactile Feedback

I was just checking out the new Tissot watches that have a touch screen and vibration feedback feature for reading and setting the watch. Pretty amazing and very innovative; perfect thing if you’re visually impaired, or maybe if you’re a deep-cover operative meeting your contact in the dark and don’t want to give away your position prematurely.

Of course, I immediately started wondering whether this type of sensory feedback could be useful. Here is the idea I came up with:

Put a small vibration transducer under the left mouse button and add functionality to your browser so that when you mouse over a link that fits a certain set of criteria (you set this up), the mouse gives a tiny vibration to your finger to encourage you to go there. This would obviously require some sort of tie-in with a very powerful indexing service, like Google, but it seems plausible. I suppose you could do the same thing visually, or audibly and save the bother of getting a special mouse, but tactile feedback would be the most intuitive way since your brain has already got a high priority connection to your index finger. It would almost become a Pavlovian-like response.

Three questions: 1) would this become annoying? 2) how often would it lead you astray? and 3) would the lack of a feedback vibration discourage you from going to places you would otherwise have discovered by accident? I suppose it leads to another whole issue too. How hard would it be for unscrupulous folks to globally hack into people’s settings to artificially bring more people to their site?

Does anyone know if publishing an idea on a Blog prevents me from patenting it later? Something tells me I just gave away the germ of a zillion dollar idea......