After getting a tip from a reader who had trouble accessing her website from a Panera Bread restaurant, Media Girl discovered that her website was being blocked by SonicWALL, a “content filtering service.”
Media Girl found that her own site had been rated, strangely, in “Category 1 - Violence/Hate/Racism.” She writes:
But, as Media Girl soon found, there seems to be little correlation between SonicWALL’s ratings and that pesky thing called “reality.”
She found, for instance, that SonicWALL classifies The Tattered Coat as
Now, I love a good game as much as anyone, but this site hardly seems to fit SonicWALL’s description of a gaming site:
While I am hosting The First Annual Katherine Harris Colorized Photo Contest (submissions still being accepted, by the way), that contest seems too recent to have been responsible for the rating.
Idyllopus did some analysis of the ratings, and noticed a few patterns, mostly having to do with the kind of blogging software being used to produce the blogs in question. But the ratings do seem pretty arbitrary.
Here are some ratings from my Philly/National blogroll:
Category 22 - Games
Attytood
Category 1 - Violence/Hate/Racism
Blinq
Category 33 - News and Media
Corrente
Category 36 - Reference
Eschaton
Category 31 - Web Communications
Fables of the Reconstruction
Category 6 - Adult/Mature Content
Category 25 - Political/Advocacy Groups
Category 35 - Usenet News Groups
Category 41 - Society and Lifestyle
iFlipFlop
Category 14 - Arts/Entertainment
MyDD
Category 25 - Political/Advocacy Groups
Rittenhouse Review
Category 33 - News and Media
Category 36 - Reference
Slacktivist
Category 27 - Information Technology/Computers
Suburban Guerrilla
Category 22 - Games
The Booman Tribune
Category 14 - Arts/Entertainment
Category 54 - Advertisement
Upyernoz
Category 31 - Web Communications
Whiskey Bar
Category 33 - News and Media
(not a picture of the author)It’s pretty hit-and-miss. At least I’m in good company in the Games category, sharing that rating with All-Spin Zone and Suburban Guerrilla.
You can check out your own blog’s rating on this page. Let us know, in the comments, how your blog was rated.
As for me, well, I’m off to play some more games.
16 Comments on "Only a Pawn in Their Game"
Tiffany:
Here’s my rating, which confuses the hell out of me, considering my site isn’t related to any of these. Then again, guess that’s just par for the course.
Category 27 - Information Technology/Computers
Category 29 - Search Engines and Portals
Category 55 - Web Hosting
Category 0 - Unrated
albert:
dragonballyee.blogs.com
Category 14 - Arts/Entertainment
Category 41 - Society and Lifestyle
Matt from the Rant:
Category 22–Games.
I’m bummed. I was hoping for cult/occult.
Chris:
Category 22–Games. That’s cool, I was thinking of quiting my job and my site to play Madden 06 any damn way.
Josh:
skaroff.com/blog
Category 22 - Games
Running WordPress
Mark:
I’m on MSN Spaces (stop laughing … seriously … I’m poor and it’s free … aww, go to hell).
Anyway, I’m a Category 64 - Unrated.
Not sure if that means I’m so obscene as to not deserve a rating, or if I just haven’t shown up on their radar.
Probably a little of both.
JLo:
I feel your pain, Mark: Category 64 - Unrated.
Not even worth a damn rating. Pricks.
Mikhail:
Category 64 — unrated. I say keep your filthy ratings off my website!!
blue girl:
I’m: Category 15: Business & Economy
!!! Yeah right !!!
Suzy Shedd:
Matt, as a matter of curiosity, did you find out which method Sonic Wall uses? If they’re using a bot/webcrawler for classification, that might explain the weirdness. If it’s a method where humans do the rating, I seem to remember that the usual human rater seldom has more than a hs education and spends approximately seven seconds on each site. If there are anyactual people at the company, why not interview someone who’s supposed to know what’s going on? THAT should be fun!
albert:
oooh, madden ‘06 - with the new move we’ll be oh so close. when does it come out?!
Mark:
The URL
http://frymax.typepad.com/longcut/
is currently rated as:
Category 15 - Business and Economy
Boooooo! I wanted games too!
I’m trying to think if I’ve ever had a post about “business and economy.”
Chris:
Albert, it’s out.
Frank:
Hey, I achieved my goal on iFlipFlop with all those Tom Cruise and The Runaway Bride stories…I’m all about the Arts & Entertainment. LOL. What kind of bozo firm can be this far off and still sell a product?
G. D. Frogsdong:
I’m a category 31-Web Communications. When I read their description of the category, all I could htink is that my allowing comments via Haloscan put me their. Well, that’s about a couple of million blogs in that category.
These filtering systems are absolutely awful. I worked at Avaya last year and they had a filtering system. Whenever I went to dictionary.com to look up a spelling, I got a warning window. Dictionary.com. What’s the problem? The dirty word definitions?
Idyllopus:
(I’m making my rounds on some of the blogs that have posted on this and leaving the following that contains some interesting information that was left at my site. Apologies if you’ve already gotten this information and I’ve not noticed it.)
I had posted about this and my findings were that there were some patterns with people one typepad tending to come up as business and economy and people on blogger tending to come up as web communications. Later a Seth Finkelstein came by my site and posted a link to his page on censorware which is very interesting. And he briefly noted in my comments area that “The system is simple. Roughly, all blogs on a service (IP address) will have a default blacklisting. Then individual blogs may have entries which override that default.”
So what he said confirms what I was finding, though, as he noted, there are exceptions.
Anyway, I suggest reading his page. He gave testimony before congress on DMCA Censorware in April 2003 and also was profiled in the NY Times in 2001 in “Cracking the code of online censorship”.
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