We made a big leap from voluntary filtering tools to censorship here.
First off, a poll: I can very easily set up a separate mailing list for
discussions related to group and public annotations. There are a lot of
people working on this and related systems, and while there are probably
enhancements to HTTP (and definitely to browsers and servers) needed to
implement this correctly, I think it's a big enough issue on its own to
merit separate discussions from www-talk. Send me mail privately if you
have an opinion, and I'll act accordingly.
Okay, now, two points about the above:
1) It's conceivable that the party being rated wouldn't be responsible
for placing or maintaining that rating themselves; while, yes, this
brings up the scary prospect of "officially sanctioned" content, it also
means unethical content providers can't squelch or discourage unfavorable
ratings. I mean, can you imagine if Siskel and Ebert could only post
their reviews on movie newspaper ads? "Two thumbs up!" would be all
you'd see.
2) If a kid is smart enough to download his own version of NetScape,
install it, and enters the URL for http://www.playboy.com/, I say he's
smart enough to handle whatever he finds there. Yes, this system is not
designed as a fail-safe system, but that doesn't mean that it's unusable.
Any grade schooler in the Bay Area can plop 75 cents into a newspaper
vending machine and get "The Spectator".
Brian
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brian@hotwired.com brian@hyperreal.com http://www.hotwired.com/Staff/brian/