1000 ways to say this, but Microsoft chose "automatic censorship"

A pretty jaw-dropping title for a patent filing by Microsoft that's designed to create automatic, real-time filtering of "offensive" language in audio.

It's easy to see how this can cause a stink. It makes you wonder if they're giving any thought into how things will play when they name stuff like this. "Filtering" would raise few eyebrows. But "Censorship"? Come on.

Dig deep enough into the patent and you can see that its intent isn't to create FCC 2.0, but instead to allow parents to monitor the language their kids hear through multiplayer video games:

Humans are remarkably adept at identifying words and phrases that are considered unacceptable. However, for certain types of broadcasts, it would be preferable to employ a more automated approach that avoids the need to pay for or provide a human censor to monitor the broadcast, while still enabling the audio data to be censored at an appropriate level. For example, in massive multiplayer games, it would be impractical to employ a human censor to monitor the multitude of voice chat sessions that might be occurring at one time.

Still, the potential for abuse of something like this--after all, it's going to draw from a generated list of words/phrases to block--is pretty daunting. As is the inherent limitation of censuring language without context: After all, a similar filter on a Christian site changed the text in Olympian Tyson Gay's name to "Tyson Homosexual."

geography is meaningless

The argument I made earlier in the week, that part of the collapse of newspapers is due to the lack of geography on the Internet, has apparently cost the head of National Public Radio his job, forced out by member stations threatened by his digital strategy:

But that push has aggravated anxiety among local stations about their relationship to the network. NPR member stations rely heavily on popular shows, particularly Morning Edition, to generate donations. But if people can listen to them through NPR's Web site or even their own cell phones, why would they stay loyal to stations still reliant on pledge drives?

It's a damn good question, one that every member station needs to answer by making their content unique, not by forcing out the guy who's having success moving radio forward.

a tale of two cities, public broadcasting style

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Today's New York Times offers an interesting take on the fortunes and future of public broadcasting, both on TV and radio. It paints an interesting picture of two mediums on very different trajectories.

The average PBS show on prime time now scores about a 1.4 Nielsen rating, or roughly what the wrestling show “Friday Night Smackdown” gets. ... On the other side of the ledger the audience for public radio has been growing: there are more than 30 million listeners now, compared to just 2 million in 1980. “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” NPR’s morning and evening news programs, are the second and fourth most listened to shows in the country.