One of the reasons you haven’t heard from me on the Google Autolink controversy (Cory pro; Gillmor, Scoble, Winer, et al con) is because I think the technology is more or less inevitable. I don’t like it much more than, say, genetic engineering, but I’m about as likely to halt one as I am the other.
For all that, however, I also didn’t think the situation was quite as dire as some made out simply because I expected to be able to route around it. Enter Mark Pilgrim’s Butler, which I guarantee you is not making the Google folks too happy. As you might be able to make out from the screenshot, using an approach similar in principle to what Autolink does technically, Butler strips out Google advertising and splices in links to competitors’ searches, among other things. All this, in what is essentially just a Proof of Concept.
Ultimately, as long as the products are opt-in, I’m not going to get overly worked up about them, because why get in a twist over something I can’t change? Try to force this on me, however, and it’ll be a much different story.
Aaron B. Hockley says:
March 15, 2005 at 8:24 am
AutoLink is only opt-in on one side…
How about an opt-out option for content publishers? A meta tag or something that says "don't screw with my page".
sogrady says:
March 15, 2005 at 8:35 am
true, Aaron, and that's certainly been one of the principle complaints.
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.
Bill de hÓra says:
March 15, 2005 at 9:44 am
Butler's really an artefact of the underlying Greasemonkey technology. I could see this one going the way of deep-linking and DRM – to the courts.
rel="nomunge" ?
sogrady says:
March 15, 2005 at 1:53 pm
could be you're right, Bill. i hope not, but could be.
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.