Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Microsoft's Michael Connolly writes about Microsoft Spaces' policy on censoring content. In order to make the site "appropriate" - and there's a world of values buried in that word! - Spaces is not allowing the use of certain words in the URL you choose, the name of your blog or the headlines you write. You can, however, use all the nasty words you want in the body of your blog. Fucking A!

I understand why Microsoft doesn't want casual visitors to be bombarded with blogs with dirty names. And it's not such an unreasonable restriction (although the language it's couched in is scary), especially if you're aiming at cutting down on the excessive profanity, not eliminating it entirely. Nevertheless, there are times when a blog entry just isn't the same if you can't give it the headline "Fuck Bush!!!!!" Believe me.

It might help if Microsoft started calling it by its real name. It's not "filtering." It's "censoring." Filtering is when a content's properties are used to move it into one of various buckets. Censoring is when you kill content. In fact, fitering would be a better solution for Spaces: Let each of us set the degree of profanity we're willing to tolerate, and filter out the headlines and blog titles that fail the test.

Filter, don't censor.