Been screwed over by your Pointy Haired Boss when you were expecting a reward? Desperately want to give the self-centered egomaniacal schmoe a dinosaur-powered wedgie? Scott Adams heard your prayers.

A revamped Dilbert site arrived on the web, and it will shock long-time visitors with the changes. Registering with the site give readers access to mashups, where they can replace an Adams punch line with something funnier and share it with friends.

Good luck on topping Adams in the punch line department. He told Salon “99.9 percent of the submitted punch lines will be less funny than my original. After all, I’ve had a lot of practice.”

In terms of mashups, several sites have popped up over the years focusing on another cartoon character, venerable fat cat Garfield. Unlike Adams and his syndicates embrace-the-Internet approach, Garfield’s masters tend to go after people who alter those strips.

“We’re accepting the realities of IP on the Internet, and trying to get ahead of the curve. People already alter Dilbert strips and distribute them. If we make it easy and legal to do so, and drive more traffic to Dilbert.com in the process, everyone wins,” Adams said in Webware.

Adams has enjoyed the success of a comic character becoming an icon for cubicle dwellers and the daily grind of putting up with bosses who can’t get out of their own way. Accepting and encouraging the creativity of his readers online could prove rewarding over time, especially as people shift reading comics and other traditional newspaper items to the Internet.

I have to admit that as a feed subscriber to the The Dilbert Blog, I’m one of the people who has helped Adams reach a "trivial" level of income from his blog’s ads. As he’s a successful cartoonist, author, speaker, and restaurateur, and I’ve bought several of his books, I’m not going to lose any sleep over that.

Neither is Scott Adams, who plans to ease off the blog accelerator. He told readers in a blog post that after posting almost daily for a couple of years, Adams plans to do less blogging.

"I found that if I wrote nine highly popular posts, and one that a reader disagreed with, the reaction was inevitably ‘I can never read Dilbert again because of what you wrote in that one post.’ Every blog post reduced my income, even if 90% of the readers loved it," he noted as one of the reasons for the demotivation to blog.

There will be less controversy as well, Adams promised. He touched a few nerves with his opinions on religion, free will, Iraq, and other topics. "A startling number of readers couldn’t tell when I was serious or kidding, so most of the negative reactions were based on misperceptions," he wrote.

On behalf of all the other moist robots who read the Dilbert Blog regularly, I’ll miss the daily fix of his opinions, theories, and Dilbert comic punch lines that were too hot for newspaper editors to print.

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Quigo picked up a high-profile win for its AdSonar auction-based pay-per-click advertising platform when it scored a deal with the World Wide Leader in Sports, ESPN. AdSonar is used by sites like the online home for Dilbert and other properties.

In announcing the deal today, Quigo chief revenue officer Henry Vogel said, “AdSonar will enable ESPN to capture the full value from its incredible brand equity and provide its advertisers with a new degree of transparency and success.”

The remark about transparency likely refers to how Yahoo and other big search advertising providers keep their proprietary algorithms and most other ad data a secret, even from their clients. ESPN’s motivation for the switch probably comes from a better share of the ad revenue than it received from Yahoo.

ESPN’s parent firm is The Walt Disney Company. The House of Mouse has a pretty healthy reputation at extracting the most money from its investments. An AdAge report on the deal noted some of the history Quigo and Disney share:

The explanation makes sense, mostly because Quigo puts the control of the auction, and thus the profits, in ESPN’s hands. Nearly 100 percent of revenue is better than 70 to 80 percent, depending on the previous deal Yahoo had with ESPN.

Now all we need to see is Deadspin bidding for the keyphrase “Chris Berman” in and ad auction and linking to this post on the Deadspin site.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Adams posted a lengthy description of his battle with voice problems and how he finally tracked down the problem with Google.

Since May 2005, he had experience problems with his voice. He could speak to an audience or talk out loud when alone in his normal voice. But conversations over the phone or face to face with another person came out unintelligible.

His visits to a variety of physicians proved fruitless. He learned about a lot of conditions he did not have – polyps, sinuses, acid reflux – yet was no closer to a resolution. Meanwhile his voice was worsening.

Then Adams experienced a revelation, and turned to a certain search engine to confirm his suspicions. (Warning – the following passage from Scott Adams’ blog hints at the cartoonist being in an undressed condition for a brief period of time. Sensitive readers and small children should skip the next two paragraphs. WebProNews cannot be held responsible for any offense or discomfort experienced by the reader, you can thank the First Amendment for that. After all, we do.)

Upon finding a specialist who validated his suspicions, Adams began to undergo Botox treatments. Those involve long needles being inserted through the neck to the vocal cords to deliver the Botox. Adams wrote that “the creepy factor is through the roof. You can feel the needle inside your neck the whole time. The “bad part” takes about 60 seconds, and believe it or not, you can actually get used to it.”

The treatment worked, to Adams’ delight. He has given a couple of speeches, where he has noticed the most improvement. He will need follow up appointments, but his joy at finding a cure well exceeds the creepy factor of the treatment.

One can’t help but think Dogbert would have suggested sticking long needles into Adams’ throat immediately. Maybe that will be the subject of a future comic.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Considering the number of Dilbert books, calendars, and other merchandise Adams has sold over the years, one would think he had enough money to keep himself and his cats in vegetarian burritos for the rest of his life.

On the Dilbert Blog, alongside his latest post about flying with people who can’t seem to turn off their BlackBerries even after the flight attendant asks people to do so, a familiar looking block of advertising is in place.

It’s not Google AdSense or the Yahoo Publisher Network, though. Dilbert, via United Feature Syndicate, uses Quigo’s AdSonar instead. A helpful link for advertisers lets them know how to join the Dilbert network as a self-serve CPC user.

“Our Pay-per-click ads appear on the Dilbert.com homepage, the Dilbert.com 30-day archive and the Dilbert Blog,” the Dilbert ad page said.

One might wonder if this could be a trend for content creators. Instead of an advertiser signing up for a network like Google’s, the appeal of advertising on certain sites would be greater for particular marketers.

There has been a bit of grousing by Google ad customers about the company’s lack of transparency into the ad placement process. Advertisers feel that some sites do a better job of sending them traffic than others, but have no control over placement with Google’s process.

The downside for popular site placement would be the potential ad inventory it could display. And, high-volume destinations could quickly see auction prices for ads leap skyward. It would be a tradeoff of cost for control of placement, and that might be enough to get advertisers to try it out on the right site.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.