There are a few classes of web pages on the web:
- Those from which I can glean some value from, as an anonymous visitor, and
- Those about which I couldn’t really care less, essentially consisting of a glorified journal entry by someone, somewhere, who assumes the rest of us care.
The web is the “wild, wild west” of information; a haven for free speech and expression as an open medium for the exploration and sharing of ideas and knowledge…
…But come on people. Those billions of “articles” from category 2 are hurting the greater good and dragging us all down into the shady realm of shoddy writing.
If you want a centralized place for friends to catch up on your recent activities, that’s fine. Just don’t publish to directories, and remove yourself from google. Believe it or not, most of us don’t actually care about your fender-bender this afternoon or the lousy guy you just spent the evening with.
We need an internet filter designed to cut through the crap and intercept the masses of junk floating around on the web before it can distract us from what we’re actually seeking.
The team working on the StupidFilter have a good start on this problem in the context of comments:
…an open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in
written English. This will be accomplished with weighted Bayesian or
similar analysis and some rules-based processing, similar to spam
detection engines.
Drop a note in the comments with any ideas on how to clean this all up.
