Ratings for blogs, coming soon to an internet near you, if, the UK’s Culture Secretary has his way. The idea being to get Obama on board and get the U.S. to go along with it. Here we go again: Who decides what blogs are safe, and which aren’t? What if the content is G-rated but the comments aren’t? What about those nude tribes on Discovery.com: R or G? (They’re educational you know.)
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Make mine R please.
Ratings for blogs, coming soon to an internet near you, if, the UK’s Culture Secretary has his way. The idea being to get Obama on board and get the U.S. to go along with it. Here we go again: Who decides what blogs are safe, and which aren’t? What if the content is G-rated but the comments aren’t? What about those nude tribes on Discovery.com: R or G? (They’re educational you know.)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
This reminds me of the great comments on your recent post about Plaid's Kringlegate holiday card (and how the Anon commentator missed the real point, even with his or her obvious experience at Fortune 100 cos). Everyone still wants to *control* communications, but *control* has left the building.
HR execs cannot effectively block people from passing digital content any more than they can stop people from speaking. Governments can try to label blog posts, but the attempt is as futile as labeling sound waves passing from your throat to my ears. There are now far too many creators using far too many channels for the old guards to get in the way.
You can sense some managers, usually the ones over 50 groomed at P&G, recoiling at this thought -- loss of control hurts. Management organizations were created because control was once required to make things work; hierarchical labor structure came from railroads, where building more than one track was prohibitively expensive and so early transportation hubs had to find a way to keep trains from running into each other. Clear control kept people alive by notifying you to stop, dammit, another big train is coming your way on Track 5.
But today, we have all the tracks we need and barriers to communication are a competitive *disadvantage.* If a hospital organization or major automaker or manufacturer of widgets limits what employees can see online (or offline), they may filter out content germane to building new knowledge. News and insight and customer feedback comes from so many directions. Walls no longer keep people alive; they suffocate the ideas an organization needs to breathe.
Sure, organizations should still demand that their participants meet behavioral standards. Your boss is welcome to check your productivity, make sure your work gets done, and that you don't curse at customers or sexually harass colleagues. But the tools you use to send information out or bring it in should belong to you. If an employee is reading porn at work or writing something that might be hurtful to others, that's a management issue -- not a filter that should be set up by IT. I don't expect IT to monitor my coffee breaks, either.
So go ahead. Put up a wall, people, and try to stop the tide. The information will flow in next door, and the competitor who welcomes it instead of you may learn to do something with it.
Pound for pound, the finest transportation metaphors in the business people.
There’s no way to rate blogs. For starters, there are too many. But it’s only a matter of time before sites are rated, like music, movies, and just about all other media. But how will a rating necessarily help? It’s always hilarious to see sites with buttons that read, “Must be 18 to enter,” as if that will stop anyone. But parents today would be open to investigating such measures. I’m pretty certain Obama would be.
This is one of Andy Burnham's more idiotic schemes and its one that's by no means found universal favour on this side of the pond.
For his troubles, the Minister has had his Twitter ID (@andyburnham) commandeered by Mike Butcher of TechCrunch http://eweri.com/28Y
Post a Comment