and i think the opt-out nature of a readable tag, while simple and thus worth considering, is likely to fall down simply because the majority of folks probably won’t update their content. even after nofollow was released - in theory to solve a much more pressing problem - i hear that thousands if not millions of blogs have not employed it.

rel=”nomunge” ?

but what i’m getting at - and i think Butler illustrates - is that the ability of a publisher to exert total control of his content is gone (presuming it was ever there in the first place), whether it’s Google or just a Firefox extension.

interesting, i can see this as being a significant issue for Google’s business model down the line, as their financials indicate a heavy dependence on ad revenue.

How about an opt-out option for content publishers? A meta tag or something that says “don’t screw with my page”.