Today
ArsTechnica has published the results of a report by ScanSafe that claims that 80 percent of blogs contain "offensive and unwanted" content. As we know, according to the latest
Technorati report, there are about 70 million blogs out there, which means that according to ScanSafe's report, there are about 56 million "offensive" blogs out there.
Fortunately for all of us however, ScanSafe is willing to come to our rescue and save us from these perils. All we have to do is purchase their products, and they will do the job and keep us sheltered. They even go as far as claiming that companies should be aggressive and prevent users from accessing some, if not all of this material.
What's really interesting is to see what ScanSafe classifies as "offensive and unwanted" content. When publishing the report, they put emphasis on the fact that "There were as many blogs with the 'F-word' as the word 'China'," - What a groundbreaking report! Better yet, it was revealed that it only takes a single profane word on a blog for it to be labelled as offensive.
For some reason, as you might have noticed already, I am having a hard time taking this report seriously. Are they so far behind in the technical development over at ScanSafe that their best method of determining whether or not a site is "unwanted" is to see if it contains a single instance of profanity? One of the great upsides of blogs as a source of information is that it eliminates the pompous and unpersonal rules of writing that is expected from other media outlets such as for instance newspapers. Does that mean that we might have to put up with some foul language every once in a while? Sure, but in most cases it's just a sign of emotion, and actually caring about what you're writing about.
So my suggestion to all of the bloggers out there is that you keep doing your thing. If that means using a foul word every now and then because that's a reflection of your personality, nobody but ScanSafe will actually care about it. And with the way they've just presented their results, I don't think we need be scared of the effects their products might have on our blogs.
