Boing Boing blocked by SmartFilter over nudity raising the question: is Boing Boing work safe?

Apparently 2 of 692 posts in January contained tiny thumbnail pictures with nudity. Of course some of those partially clad Suicide Girls ads — much more permanent and pervasive — might have set the SmartFilter reviewer off too.

Firstly, I’m not a regular Boing Boing reader, nor even a BB afficiando, so my comments are based on being an periodic reader at best. I like some of their content, but there’s too much for me to stay up with (keep reading). It’s like Fark and Slashdot and even Digg to an extent. I have to limit the firehose sources if I want to have time to explore other newer writers, products/services to review and, well, actually get some work done.

Secondly, for those who complained about BB, look at how long any one story at Boing Boing stays on the front page and in the RSS aggregator. At nearly a story an hour (yowsa) that means that if you don’t check it a couple times a day, you will miss stories or need to hit the archives to catch up. You might even miss that brief peek at thumbnail nudity a couple times a month. To quote Janice from Friends: Oh. My. God.

To me, articles like this just indicate how even human editor filtering is flawed. Boing Boing is rated PG 13 to R, not X, even with the Suicide Girls ads and a couple tiny nudie photos a month. Some of their ads might be pushing the lines for being “workplace safe” according to 1950s moralaties, sure, but the same could be said about Engadget (and has been by some of their readers).

My question isn’t if Boing Boing is workplace safe now, but when will they get even more aggressive and start accepting ads for sites that are even more adult? Notice from the screenshot above that Battelle is really pushing the FM Publishing ad network stuff. If they open an adult division, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they did, then will Boing Boing become … Fleshbot?

Did this post make you go hmm?

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