Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Where has all the pr0n gone?
I just saw on CNN that:
The article discusses COPA and Congress' previous attempts to end explicit adult content online before it gets more into this study conducted by Philip B. Stark, a statistics professor at University of California, Berkeley. Stark analyzed the information collected from ISPs and search engine companie when the Justice Department subpoenaed them. And here's a bit of what he found:
Or, as ITWeek UK likes to think of it: Internet is 99 per cent porn free!
The San Jose Mercury News allegedly has a copy of the report. But they show (on their website) only a few statistics and not any details or excerpts. Disappointing.
I have not found Stark's report yet, but I did find a wealth of backdround information and documents about COPA and at Electronic Frontier Foundation. Check it out!
"About 1 percent of Web sites indexed by Google and Microsoft are sexually explicit, according to a U.S. government-commissioned study."I find that suprisingly LOW.
The article discusses COPA and Congress' previous attempts to end explicit adult content online before it gets more into this study conducted by Philip B. Stark, a statistics professor at University of California, Berkeley. Stark analyzed the information collected from ISPs and search engine companie when the Justice Department subpoenaed them. And here's a bit of what he found:
"Stark also examined a random sample of search-engine queries. He estimated that 1.7 percent of search results at Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, MSN and Yahoo Inc. are sexually explicit and 1.1 percent of Web sites cataloged at Google and MSN fall in that category.Except for the overseas porn. But, anyway...About 6 percent of searches yield at least one explicit Web site, he said, and the most popular queries return a sexually explicit site nearly 40 percent of the time.
But filters blocked 87 percent to 98 percent of the explicit results from the most popular searches on the Web, Stark found."
Or, as ITWeek UK likes to think of it: Internet is 99 per cent porn free!
The San Jose Mercury News allegedly has a copy of the report. But they show (on their website) only a few statistics and not any details or excerpts. Disappointing.
I have not found Stark's report yet, but I did find a wealth of backdround information and documents about COPA and at Electronic Frontier Foundation. Check it out!
Labels: COPA, EFF, filters, search
Thursday, November 09, 2006
One reason why blogging is great
I just read a post at Bodarko referring to a great short post about "why blogging is great" at timbl's blog. I had just finished doing a class about Google tricks and had briefly addressed the idea of credibility, verifiability, trust, ranking, linking, etc. And then here comes this timbl guy with a very elegant explanation about social bookmarking and trust.
"People have, since it started, complained about the fact that there is junk on the web. And as a universal medium, of course, it is important that the web itself doesn't try to decide what is publishable. The way quality works on the web is through links.
It works because reputable writers make links to things they consider reputable sources. So readers, when they find something distasteful or unreliable, don't just hit the back button once, they hit it twice. They remember not to follow links again through the page which took them there. One's chosen starting page, and a nurtured set of bookmarks, are the entrance points, then, to a selected subweb of information which one is generally inclined to trust and find valuable."
Well done, sir. WELL DONE!
He goes on to state that blogging is a great example of "a gently evolving network of pointers of interest." Then he goes on to bemoan that in a recent interview his message was misinterpreted, stressing concerns about blogs and the failures of the Internets.
He continues:
"In fact, it is a really positive time for the web. Startups are launching, and being sold again, academics are excited about new systems and ideas, conferences and camps and wikis and chat channels and are hopping with energy, and every morning demands an excruciating choice of which exciting link to follow first."
I am especially interested in what timbl extrapolates from blogs and FOAF files: a trust infrastructure. How cool is that?
"People have, since it started, complained about the fact that there is junk on the web. And as a universal medium, of course, it is important that the web itself doesn't try to decide what is publishable. The way quality works on the web is through links.
It works because reputable writers make links to things they consider reputable sources. So readers, when they find something distasteful or unreliable, don't just hit the back button once, they hit it twice. They remember not to follow links again through the page which took them there. One's chosen starting page, and a nurtured set of bookmarks, are the entrance points, then, to a selected subweb of information which one is generally inclined to trust and find valuable."
Well done, sir. WELL DONE!
He goes on to state that blogging is a great example of "a gently evolving network of pointers of interest." Then he goes on to bemoan that in a recent interview his message was misinterpreted, stressing concerns about blogs and the failures of the Internets.
He continues:
"In fact, it is a really positive time for the web. Startups are launching, and being sold again, academics are excited about new systems and ideas, conferences and camps and wikis and chat channels and are hopping with energy, and every morning demands an excruciating choice of which exciting link to follow first."
I am especially interested in what timbl extrapolates from blogs and FOAF files: a trust infrastructure. How cool is that?
