Shoot your television without scattering glass across the living room! Drag Kick Ass to your bookmarks bar. On any web page with something you feel like shooting, click the bookmark. An asteroids-style spaceship will appear. You can steer it with the arrow keys, shoot in the direction you’re pointing with the space bar, and press-and-hold the ‘b’ key to outline your targets if you need more precision.

This is a shot across the bow of anyone who thinks they’ll be able to control how their visitors interact with their web sites. If they want to, they can treat your page as a video game, and all of your carefully-crafted navigational channeling as things to blow up. That web site you and your team spent months in meetings for, rushed when the meetings were over and it turns out the deadline was moved up three months, and delved into the strangeness of Internet Explorer 6 so as to ensure that the board of director’s default browser could still see it? That web site?

It’s nothing but a couple of hundred points in a game of asteroids.

C-SPAN’s Glenn Beck Shuffle: this photo isn’t from the “liberal group rally”. It’s from the Glenn Beck rally from August 28. Bonus points: when they covered the Beck rally, did they highlight a link to Beck’s web site?

This is one step closer to the Internet’s promise to revolutionize the way we receive news. The revolution cannot come too soon. Just today, C-SPAN has some “reporting” up about the One Nation rally in Washington; attendance is apparently not up to their liking. So they tried to run a photo from the Glenn Beck rally last month. They were caught by Jim Hoft and replaced the photo with one showing a lot more grass. But how often does this sort of thing happen and they don’t get caught? How many people already visited the site and have no idea that their initial impression of the rally, based on the photo C-SPAN originally ran, is wrong?

Compare this to C-SPAN’s photo by looking for the kid in the red shirt, his head resting on his palm. To the kid’s left, a man wearing a white cap looks back into the crowd. These were either taken at the same moment or they are the same photo with different cropping. This photo was posted by Yahoo on August 28.

Wouldn’t it be amazing to have a browser plug-in that automatically overlayed what other people are saying about any particular article on the web? Pulling in from a Memeorandum-like aggregator of well-trafficked bloggers? So that, when you’re visiting C-SPAN you automatically see Jim Hoft’s exposé? And when visiting any newspaper story about poll results, you see what the Ace of Spades HQ has to say about it?

And this would be completely outside of the control of the organization pushing the kind of journalistic malpractice that C-SPAN is engaging in here? That would absolutely be kick ass.