Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Stupid Mindless Ratings

Today I was reminded of the web-page that will give a rating for a blog or web-page based on various words that are found in it. What I find interesting is that various innocuous words in context, your rating will quite quickly go from G to PG to NC-17 to R. For example one of the words flagged from my wife's blog was 'Dick' which in context referred to her uncle Dick who is sick in hospital. But that mention of Dick was misinterpreted to be a euphemism for a certain part of the male human anatomy. One can only imagine what the rating of a page with an abundance of quotes from the Dick and Jane early learning books would result in. The repeated, "See Dick run.
Run Dick, run" would certainly make a mindless word based scan quite useless.

This is not to mention that apparently the word "missionary" is also flagged. I don't know what they have against a missionary, although I guess the word missionary might refer to more than just a missionary who goes somewhere to proclaim something or to something quite unrelated.

If I start speaking about death or dying, even though death is all around us, even though I may simply be speaking of my grief over the death of my dog, all of a sudden my rating will go to R because I use the word death.

Needless to say, it is obvious that such a rating tool as this is utterly useless. It pains me to say, that there are probably people who actually depend on it. And if they saw my current rating after this post, they would want to avoid this site like the plague

1 comments:

Annette said...

hun! you are "r" rated! Well..I never! :) silly post. Weird ratings. :)

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