Robert Scoble does everyone a favor by boiling down the outrage over Google’s Autolink feature to an easily understandable idea,

Anything that changes my content is evil.

Wow. I happen to take the opposite view — as long as changes aren’t forced on users by spyware or tools that are shipped with the browser and turned on by default, I think its great if you want to change my content in a way that better suits your needs. And I do the same thing.

Want to turn images off? Go for it. Want to run a Firefox extension that inserts graphics next to any link that is for a PDF or MP3 file? Be my guest — I use such an extension myself.

In fact, thanks to the beauty of Firefox, I have an extension that modifies Google search pages to add content to them, and another that strips away embedded Flash from sites that use those.

In Scoble’s world that’s evil. Call it Fear of a Linked Planet,

Dossy: we’ll have to agree to disagree. A lot of times my LACK of a link IS editorial. I can see a world where every word is linked. Do you really want that?

So in Scoble’s world an extension for Firefox that automatically created a link for every word to say Dictionary.Com would be the height of evil. Me, I think that’d be a pretty cool tool to have.

As I said before, the past few years have seen any number of content industries suddenly realize they are no longer in control of the experience that their customers have. The advent of things like the Tivo and the iPod have generally been favored by the same people who are not horrified that users might have tools in their browsers to modify their content in ways that suit the individual needs of the person visiting the site rather than the publisher.

To me, Scoble and company come off as silly as the sites I used to visit which tried to disable right-clicking and similar features to keep people from saving the page. Just give it up.

A couple weeks ago, my wife and I are having lunch at a restaurant that has real silverware. I’m purusing the menu and notice they have some sort of steak sandwich that has a notation that it can be prepared “Diablo style”.

Ignoring the small print explanation, I point this out to my wife and suggest that this might mean that we have to kill rats and imps and the food falls out onto the floor like magic.

Remembering how much time we both wasted on this sort of activity, we went with the chicken.

Presumably in another decade the same restaurant will offer its sandwich “World of Warcraft style.”

I really couldn’t care less about the Jeff Gannon affair one way or the other, except to point out that this Fox News story underlies what idiots our elected officials are (and this idiot Conyers is, unfortunately, from Michigan — emphasis added),

[John] Conyers and [Louise] Slaughter note in their letter that in an October 2003 interview with Wilson, Guckert referenced a memo written by U.S. intelligence officials indicating the operative suggested Wilson could investigate reports that Iraq had sought uranium.

“In and of itself, this indicates that Mr. Guckert had access to classified information,” the two lawmakers wrote. And “it appears now that Mr. Guckert memorialized his experiences at the White House.”

As has been widely reported about the Gannon affair, Gannon mentioned the memo almost two weeks after the Wall Street Journal reported on it. There’s no evidence that Gannon did anything but read the WSJ story about the memo and ask an official about the memo. Certainly the fact that he knew about the memo was proof “in and of itself” that Gannon had access to the memo only if you accept the bizarre proposition that everyone who also read the Wall Street Journal’s report “had access to classified information.”

I can’t believe I’m doing this because back in 1994 I swore I would never step foot in another grad classroom, but today I received a letter informing me that I’d been accepted in a master’s program. This should be interesting.