Outfilter the filterers

[Albert Lunde]

At 11:50 AM -0500 4/11/97, Steve Hooley! wrote:
>        What we need is for some enterprising programmer on the list
>(hint,hint) to create a generic filter with a customizable, public-domain
>list of sites to ban. Then we could do our own filtering in-house.

PICS might serve this role. As well as allowing for self rating of sites, I
think the PICS spec allows thord-party rating services to offer ratings on
other sites. I'm not sure that there are clients that support this yet
though.

It may not become popular for lack of a business model -- the issue we are
running into in this discussion is partly who pays for collecting the
filtering data. I'm not sure there is a way to _pay_ for third party-rating
services.

Regarding a way to come up with ratings from a consortium: one approach
might be to take "votes" from multiple raters. You could then offer
different rating scales based on either one negative vote rejecting a site
(a "least-common-denominator" model) vs. a super-majority being required
reject a site.

One issue may be the limits of rating sites on a one dimensional scale of
acceptable-unacceptable. A multi-dimensional approach might be better.
There are still are still lots of cultural factors and value judgements
that go into rating.

(I can see why people might prefer not to rating anything rather than open
this can 'o worms.)

---
    Albert Lunde                      Albert-Lunde at nwu.edu