Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

This article was sparked by reading Cathy's post yesterday titled "Not the real World". In it she muses about how people in the non connected world, those who don't participate as bloggers, or other viral networking systems that the Internet is composed of tend to share a narrow, often inaccurate view of reality, current events, people and ideas.

I think Cathy is absolutely right and I want to explore some reasons as to why.

It never ceases to amaze me; the stupidity of people. As Charles Mackay wrote long ago in his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds men go mad in herds but only come to their senses one by one.

It seems there are some people who just really do not understand the Internet, and in their rush (or greed) to get rich quickly ignore all the commonsense and warnings of those who like Darren Rowse have achieved some measure of wealth from blogging. How? Darren explains often that his problogger.net website is not his mail money maker, rather his Digital Photography school website is. He provides a real product for real people.

And so to the point of this article, and the nature of the Internet that seems to have been forgotten in the glimmer of fools gold. As Doug McCaughan sagely observes, people use the web for Information, Utility and Entertainment, in that order.

So where are the fools? I think there are two types.

www.2007rapture.com is an embarrassing website name. Shelby Corbitt who writes this website makes numerous claims here regarding a "rapture" that was supposed to happen in 2007. Well news for Shelby, no rapture buddy. He/She has already tried to explain why this didn't happen but the explanation is pretty pointless.

Some of the mistakes Shelby has made include:

Its happened. Labours new minister for the idiots - I mean Internet, has advised that they will be supporting mandatory ISP filtering - supposedly to protect children from pornography. Download their "plan for cyber safety". The plan starts of talking about the need to educate and a combined approach by parents and teachers - sounds good. How do they plan to do this? By providing a mandatory clean feed. What the heck is that?

Lachlan Heyward from the Herald Sun writes:

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said everything possible had to be done to shield children from violent and pornographic online material.

"We have always argued more needs to be done to protect children," he said.