Friday, December 03, 2004

If You Can't Blog Freely, What's The Point? 

Boingboing investigates the fact that MSN Spaces, Microsoft's new blogging tool, censors certain words you might try to include in a blog title or url by testing several obscene blog titles, often with hilarious results. "Lolita" is censored, but "butt" is not; "pornography" is censored, but "sex" seems perfectly allowable; "corporate whore" doesn't work, but "corporate prostitute" seems acceptable. Full post includes screenshots of some rather amusing blogs made as part of the experiment.

In the end, as author Xeni notes, the result is not atypical: A mixed bag of results that manages to do what most attempts to automate censorship do -- make fools of the censors. C.f. everything from school internet filters to, more recently, blogexplosion's shoutbox, which *bleeps* out words from damn to worse but can be sworn at using the creative workaround of compound words.

The real news here, of course, is the "too little, too late" dismissal. Why the heck anyone would bother using a Microsoft blogging tool? More consideration from all angles, collected by boingboing -- ain't metablogs great?

posted by boyhowdy | 1:21 PM |

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Comments:

It would be different if Microsoft did something to ADD to the blogging experience. Say, add video feeds, audio feeds - really cool things that no blogging tool automatically offers.

It's just weird that M.S. seems to be doing stuff to SUBTRACT from the blogging experience.

But hell, guess you can't be a corporate whore for Microsoft...

# posted by  Shaw Israel Izikson : 5:30 PM, December 03, 2004

 

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