Cry Link and Let Slip the Dogs of Blog

Links are on people's minds lately. A while back, there was this thing about combatting "web spam" (or "comment spam" or what have you) with the "nofollow" idea. I seem to recall some back and forth about that, which might still be going on, but whatever. It seems like it might work a little, but I'm sure it's not a silver bullet. We'll see.

Then today I notice everyone is in all sorts of a huff over a new Google Toolbar feature called AutoLink. I haven't used AutoLink, haven't yet updated my Google Toolbar in any of my Internet Explorer browsers, and haven't even looked at the Google page about this new gizmo, but I don't think I need to because the argument, such as it is, is simple:

• Google Toolbar's AutoLink feature lets you click a button on the Google Toolbar which rewrites links in the page you're viewing to be different from what the author of the page may have specified in the source of the page
  
  
  
  • Some people think this is really bad.
    
  • Some people think this is perfectly fine.
    
  • Some people aren't sure.
    
  • Some people don't care.
    
  
  

I've read ridiculously little of what (seems) out there so far, and again, I have yet to actually try this thing out, but I find myself falling into the camp of this being perfectly fine. I do this sort of thing already all the time, primarily through the use of web proxies, such as the late Proxomitron, Privoxy, Squid, and also through things like PithHelmet, Firefox's pop-up blocker, IE's pop-up blocker, and Opera's user-specified stylesheets. AutoLink is different in exactly what and how it does it, but the fundamentals are the same; altering content requested from a server on the client-side application.

While reading about this, I had a thought which was more or less echoed exactly by this guy over here in the comments section of another member of the "perfectly fine" club. Perhaps there's so much noise about this because it's Google, though why that matters isn't particularly clear. People perceive Google as a threat, I suppose, in some areas, which is probably astute, but that shouldn't be a cause to abandon all reason. People, when they can be rational, know that the same goes for Microsoft, Wal-Mart, or the scrappy little software company your step-cousin started up to write your artificial heart command and control software that you're going to be getting hot fixes for when you're seventy because today you've got him running to the corner store to buy you more Cheddar and Sour Cream Ruffles all the damn time.

I mean, seriously, what the F? People must be bored. Isn't there still a huge war going on? Aren't we still about to dissolve the rule of law? Just to pick something else. The Oscars happened the other day, too. Focus, people.

UPDATE:
I just got this email from my friend Ben Gross, who also happens to have a page all about information filtering. It's a great resource that I encourage all of my readers, yes, all two of you (including myself), to dig into.

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add Javascript/DHTML to a Web page before it is rendered. This means that you can effectively you can rewrite Web pages on the fly. A simple example is using Greasemonkey to removed ads or change the look and feel of a site, but there are far more interesting uses particularly ones that add functionality. I highly recommend looking at the examples.

http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/

GreaseMonkey User Scripts.
http://69.90.152.144/collab/GreaseMonkeyUserScripts

Greasemonkey: Hacking the Web with JavaScript
http://javascript.weblogsinc.com/entry/1234000273026520/