Update to the dicsussing issues with adult content for web businesses

We can see a number of cases demonstrating that there are many issues with delivering adult content in the Web. From latest, I would like to highlight following two:

New Microsoft search engine Bing.com is perfect if you want to see the porn multimedia: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/01/bing_hits_uk/

The ISP Triple Fibre Network has been closed by FTC for multiple violations, including spam and child porn http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/06/3fn.shtm .

Regarding last article: if you have the host at some hosting provider or ISP, are you sure you are safe? ISP can be closed at any time, and all your resources will be unaccessible.

Picollator and the big competition: Update

Due to the number of announces about new start-ups offering ‘image search’ or ‘automatic image tagging’, ‘new opportunities for customers’ and ‘new approach to web search’, a user is hesitating what to choose. I would like to provide the list of simple questions, which the user should ask evaluating new offers.

Q1: Does it (the announced service) have the online demo?
No=0, Yes=1

Q2: Does it allow to put a user’s query to try?
No=0, Yes=1

Q3: Does it allow to submit user’s picture to search?
No=0, Yes=1

Q4: Does it work with grey-scale images and good artworks?
No=0, Yes=1

Q5: Does it allow to submit picture and text together to search?
No=0, Yes=1

Q6: Does it search for similar objects rather than identical?
No=0, Yes=1

Now please calculate the Sum from all answers. If you obtain Sum=6, pay attention on this new service.

Comment on ‘Walking the Cyberbeat’ by Newsweek

Newsweek has published an interesting article ‘Walking the Cyberbeat’ about fighting against the adult and other unwanted content at Facebook and its biggest competitor MySpace. The article is very fresh and its reflects main issues with content moderation at social networks. However, one important thing attracted my attention. Nick Summers, an author of that article, made an example on the typical work of the content moderator at Facebook. The example contains following phrase:

After delivering a verdict on 75 of the 438,848 outstanding photos flagged by Facebook users… …Axten is off to a meeting. It’s just another day at the office of the world’s fastest-growing social-networking site.

And another one:

The 26-year-old Stanford grad is one of some 150 people the young company employs to keep the site clean—out of a total head count of 850.

In my words, it means following from the point of view of CEO, COO, CFO and CMO:

1. 150 people are paid regularly for doing the manual work and Facebook pays all taxes, social insurance, operational expenses and overheads for the team of 150 people.
2. No doubts, 150 people can do much more for Facebook than doing that very monotonous work
3. 150 of 850 people are in content moderation, which means that more than 17% of the whole team is making this strange manual work.
4. Those 150 people can moderate 150*75=11,250 images of  more than 400,000 outstanding images, which is less than 3% of daily demands. If you know ISO9001, it is 3x times less than 10%
5. The results of their work are far from what is good, because of the performance and because they process images which flagged by Facebook users. How many other images among billions at Faceboook are not flagged?

I am not criticising Facebook. Same issues exist in all other companies running public web services, including MySpace. It reminds the history of the industrial progress: in 18 century most of the work has been done by people. Then machines arise. It is very strange that managers in IT still think in terms of 18 century.

So I would recommend a simple thing for them: just count everything and finally think that maybe it is better to use piFilter as the automatic detection tool, which covers 100% and does not need social taxes, overheads and operational expenses.