Flag This!

Well, not exactly. Blogger has a new little feature that lets you flag blogs within the blogspot.com universe that may have objectionable material. And what the heck are they considering "objectionable"?

Is this yet another attempt by the company to censor and restrict content within Blogger?

Blogger explains:

It is our strong belief that blogs help make the Web an important medium of self-expression; Blogger has given a voice to millions of people. Our users gossip, joke, rant, publish, share, and on occasion might post potentially objectionable stuff. We generally do not review the content posted through our service but our responsibility extends beyond Blogger users to casual readers of Blog*Spot.

The "Flag?" button is a means by which readers of Blog*Spot can help inform us about potentially questionable content, so we can prevent others from encountering such material by setting particular blogs as "unlisted." This means the blog won't be promoted on Blogger.com but will still be available on the web — we prefer to keep in mind that one person's vulgarity is another's poetry. Or something like that.

For more serious cases, such as spam blogs or sites engaging in illegal activity, we will continue to enforce our existing policies (removing content and deleting accounts when necessary).

Sounds reasonable, but I can picture serious abuse of this policy, especially for politically motivated blogs. And it doesn't matter which side of the political spectrum you fall on, someone will find your content objectionable.

We'll be watching. And you can be assured that I'm going to blog it too.