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9. December 2008 – 11:01 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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There is no doubt that the large majority of internet users would agree that there has to be some sort of action against the proliferation of illegal content on the internet. The question is how this could be achieved without harming innocent and productive use of the web. In 2004 British Telecom in the United Kingdom went live with Cleanfeed, a content filtering system which targets material related to child sexual abuse identified by the Internet Watch Foundation. All other UK Internet Service Providers agreed on implementing a version of this system till the end of 2007. BoingBoing has posted a flowchart describing how Cleanfeed works in detail. The widespread use of this system since 2008 recently has produced its first major controversy:
The Cleanfeed system identified a certain picture on Wikipedia.org (an album cover by the band Scorpions) as being content related to child sexual abuse. The system is set up to block such content by blocking the IP address of the server providing the content for all costumers who use an ISP who has Cleanfeed implemented (which should be all UK ISPs by now). Wikipedia on the other hand provides one IP address to all persons who want to edit any article on the site. The result is that all costumers of UK ISPs are now unable to edit Wikipedia which “breaks” the purpose and a major function of the site. No internet user in the UK could for example start writing an article about this controversy on the Wikipedia.
This example shows the problems of widespread and general purpose filtering of internet content at the ISP level:
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23. June 2008 – 11:36 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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This is the title of the book written by Clay Shirkys discussing the development of the internet towards a user generated web – nothing new on first glace. This topic has been discussed for a long time already but the dimensions of these developments have changed dramatically over the course of the last two years. Websites which are based on content and activity produced by users have found their way into the mainstream. This is clearly visible for the English speaking net. In Germany this trends seems to be strong too.
Among the Top 50 websites of the world (End of 2007) are 15-20 (depending on the used definition) which almost exclusively depend on user generated content. To put this into perspective: DIGG.com counts 26 million individual visitors on its site per month and is on rank 32 of the top 50 list. Websites like Myspace, Wikipedia or Youtube are much higher in the ranking.
If one takes a look on such ranking for German websites one could assume that this trend is not reflected here. Among the Top 50 sites (AGOF) there are eight which are mostly user generated. But this angle does not take into account that most of this kind of usage form German users happens on English speaking and especially American websites. 3.6% of all Myspace users and 7% of all visitors to Wikipedia.org are from Germany. Keeping this in mind this kind of internet use seems to be in the mainstream in Germany as well.
Of course not all of these users are active in the sense that they provide content themselves but the importance of user generated media for the net is obvious. Maybe Clay Shirky should call the second version of this book “Here is everybody”!
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