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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He contended that blog posts or comments exist as a commodity, as they are limited in the value they can provide. It is better to write articles of depth and substance, which help attract paying customers.

Those are the people who a business can “own” with relationships that a search engine cannot. Nielsen has decried search for taking value away from content. Google and others can’t take away a relationship.

Nielsen’s observations indicate a way of playing with the perceptions of visitors. Fatter content, preferably of quality, imparts authoritativeness on the site publisher. People think it’s more valuable if the articles span a few paragraphs consistently.

I found it interesting to contrast Nielsen’s position with a content creator who has built a fortune with minimal content, and an eye on human nature. Dilbert creator Scott Adams has mentioned his interest and training in hypnosis several times over the years, and he just wrote a lengthy blog post about it.

Adams noted how he once ran an ad where he offered to hypnotize people into “remembering” their past lives for $20. “We learned you should charge for your service because it makes you more credible and makes the hypnosis easier,” he said.

That seems to be Nielsen’s position as well. Giving away short blog posts and comments may be as ineffective an approach as offering free hypnosis sessions. Maybe that is a good reason to decry blogging and commenting with little depth.