There are rating systems out there for a lot of things. The video game industry self-imposed the ESRB rating system to protect young children against violent and other questionable content. In the music industry, you’ll find CD covers that have that “explicit lyrics” warning so that parents can decide if it’s okay for their child to listen to Kanye West. By far the most widely-known rating system, however, is the MPAA and what they do with movies. After all, a family-friendly Disney animated film is quite different than the sexual romps found in Eyes Wide Shut or the violence found in Sin City.
Well, a website has decided to set up a rating system for blogs as well. RT Cunningham of Untwisted Vortex recently wrote about this rating system, determining that his blog was rated G, making it perfectly suitable for all audiences. I’m not 100% sure how the system at Mingle2 operates, but it doesn’t seem to take pictures into consideration. Instead, it just scans through some of the text on your site and looks for questionable words and phrases. I believe it only looks at original content and not comments.
In any case, I went ahead and put Beyond the Rhetoric to the test and found out that yes, it is also rated G for general audiences.
I’d imagine that most “mainstream” blogs would fall under this category, but when I put the [ED]ition through the ringer, it decided that Ed Lau’s blog warranted a PG-13. Apparently his blog is too violent and too pornographic, because it found three instances of the word “punch”, 2 instances of the word “suck”, and one instance of the word “sexy.” By contrast, Beyond the Rhetoric was only dinged for a single instance of the word “drugs”.
Chadio‘s MySpace page got the harshest rating of them all: R for Restricted. But that’s understandable, considering that he is such an explicit rapper and his site is filled with cuss words.
How family friendly is your blog? Click on either of the images above to find out for yourself.
A standard like this already exists… I believe it is also used by parental filters also:
http://www.icra.org/webmasters/
Mingle2 is seriously flawed.
First of all, it only checks the main page.
Second, it just searches for words. It doesn’t look at them in context. Such as my Blog, it found the word “crack”. But, I’m using that word in “it’s probably temperated, though, so it’ll just crack”, not as in the drug.
It wouldn’t actually be all that hard to fix the first one. Although, it would end up being a “bot” that would have to search through and follow all your internal links. Or, it could utilize a sitemap, if it’s available.
The second one would require some sort of algorithm. Making it much more complicated to fix.
By Mingle2, I mean the Blog Rater by Mingle2. 😛
Oh noes!
We all know the audiences of our blogs. If they haven’t heard the word “suck” by now, they have bigger problems.
My blog got a PG since I said crap too much. What’s up with that?
Mingle2 had the right idea about these surveys, as they are getting a ton of free blog publicity from them.
You are right about that.
I got “G” but had “crack” too. It was about the copy protection of HD-DVD being semi-crack.
My 2012movies.net site got a “G” and had “dead” for Dead Man’s Chest. It did not see Deadwood.
The best was a “G” for my adult funny toons blog. “No bad words were found.” lol
I had to put a famous man magazine to get the “R” graphic.
The ideal is good but they should make available the graphic to all.
ha yea, i got a G for having the word “pissed”
I got a G too
My blog content is child-safe too!
Here is my rating: http://betshopboy.blogspot.com/2007/07/what-is-your-blog-rating.html
I’ve seen this lately around the blogosphere. My blog was rated G, I didn’t expect it to be higher.