Dan Drezner recently noted that blogging is going mainstream in academe, with several highly respected academics starting blogs, and wonders why more senior scholars, especially prominent political scientists, don’t join the fray. Eugene Volokh, writing earlier in the week in the NYT, wonders how laws protecting journalists from revealing their sources will apply to bloggers.
This morning, from CNET News, we have the other end of the blogosphere:
MSN bloggers try to foul up censorship tool
MSN Spaces, Microsoft’s new blogging service, has sparked a new game for some of its users: trying to circumvent its censorship controls. BoingBoing, a popular Web log, on Friday reported that MSN Spaces is rejecting certain blog titles or URLs because they contain words that Microsoft has deemed inappropriate. However, like so many censorship tools, Microsoft’s is proving less than perfect. BoingBoing found that all of the most obvious profanities fell foul of Microsoft’s electronic sentries. But the fun started for many users when blogs with tricky titles that resembled innocuous terms–think of a racier version of “tit for tat,” for example–cleared Microsoft’s censorship filters.
Getting a blog with a dirty name past the MSN Spaces controls may be fun, but it also illustrates the tensions between the traditionally free and open world of blogging and the more corporate approach of a software giant like Microsoft. “If you can’t speak freely on a blog, what’s the point of having one?” BoingBoing pointed out.
These tensions are also apparent in Microsoft’s approach to blog content. Unlike rival services such as Blogger, MSN Spaces forces new users to grant Microsoft permission to “use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat” their blog postings.
While I can understand the amusement value of trying to circumvent MSN’s restrictions once they were discovered, one wonders why so many people actually tried to register a scatological name to begin with?*
In any case, I’m hoping no tenured political scientist from a top 20 university starts a blog with a name so vulgar that Microsoft feels a need to ban it.
Update: Come to think of it, this phenomenon isn’t limited to blogging. Back in my professorial days, I was frequently perplexed by the e-mail addresses some of my students not only chose for themselves but didn’t mind writing down as their “official” one for class use, many of which suggested that the person in question was involved in the prostitution or pornography industries.
