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.
