I will have the great pleasure of visiting Montreal next week on March 16th and 17th to visit some clients. I do have some time available to meet with anyone wanting to get together to talk social media, user generated content, social media monitoring or content and community moderation services and explore opportunities to work together. Want to connect?
Is the color of the text in this sentence black or blue? The answer is obvious isn’t it? It`s blue of course. I thought I would post this question in order to shed light behind the content moderation process and how we work hard every day working to prevent inappropriate and offensive content from appearing online.
ICUC Moderation Services has been moderating online user generated content since 2002, and in that time we have moderated hundreds of millions of messages, photos and videos for some of the world’s biggest brands. Currently my clients rely on the expertise of ICUC to minimize the risk that comes from participating in an online world that is increasingly being populated by user generated content. These clients rely on us because they trust us. They trust the many processes, procedures, and best practices we have implemented to ensure minimal risk is exposed when moderating their online content or community.
Our moderators are well trained, spending weeks (and sometimes months) of training along with an ongoing training program. We conduct regular workshops discussing hate /racism and human rights issues. We work very closely with our clients in creating and managing ongoing updates to the content moderation guidelines.
Unfortunately however, it is not as easy as reading a paragraph and making a decision that is black or white. What might be offensive to the eyes of one reader might be clearly agreeable to another – or simply offensive but not hateful. This is proven every time we sit down with a client to craft a set of moderation guidelines.
As well as we are prepared, and as knowledgeable as we can be, offensive content is unfortunately still going to make it online and onto a moderated website. Simply put, achieving 100% perfection is difficult if not impossible because when dealing with a person’s point of view, it is never black or white. What is entirely possible however is through both technology and people, to limit, manage and reduce the amount of offensive content that can potentially appear on a website.
Let me use this analogy to better set expectations.It has become an accepted norm that enterprise applications should operate 99.9% of the time.So if that’s the case, let’s then assume the same principles apply for online content moderation. A website that generates 100,000 comments per month will have about 100 offensive and inappropriate comments each month that will offend someone. Think about 100 comments that spit vitriol, hate, abuse and anything else that you can think of that is offensive.
Of course the alternative is having no content moderation at all and I don`t have to tell anyone what kind of can of worms that will open. While I personally agree with an open discussion and freedom of speech, it is not for everyone. I will add that if people are offended by what they see up there now, you should see what we have had to remove.
In closing, I can assure you we take content moderation very seriously and take the responsibility we have to our clients very seriously. We carry no personal views when conducting our job but simply follow the guidelines that are set in front of us.It is a difficult job, balancing and understanding people’s points of view, but it is a difficult job we are happy and proud to have.
It took some time but it is now complete, keithbilous.com is now live and in living color.
With the help of my friends over at Revolute Solution and the excellent design work of my good friend Arif, we finally got the bugs out and went live over the past couple of days.
While the site will continue to evolve over the next few weeks with slight changes along the way, it is more or less complete.
Keithbilous.com was built using Sweet Cron and it aggregates all of my online activity into one website. When I upload a photo to Picasa or Flickr, it will automatically post it to keithbilous.com. When I comment on a story across the web or post a tweet on Twitter, it will automatically post the content to keithbilous.com. It is simply magic.
So what does this mean for this blog NumberOne Snowstreet? Nothing. I will continue to post my thoughts, opinions and random dribble on this blog and have it aggregated to the lifestream.
Check it out if you have a moment and pop the lifestream RSS feed into your feed reader.
I got this great email from my friends Chuck and Joanne and thought I would share it with the rest of you.
Happy New Year to all! May 2009 be YOUR year!
Chuck + Joanne Dueck
TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN BRITISH COLUMBIA 1. Vancouver: 1.5 million people and two bridges. You do the math. 2. Your $400,000 Vancouver home is just 5 hours from downtown. 3. You can throw a rock and hit three Starbucks locations. 4. There's always some sort of deforestation protest going on. 5. Weed.
TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN ALBERTA 1. Big rock between you and BC. 2. Ottawa who? 3. Tax is 5% instead of the approximately 200% it is for the rest of the country. 4. You can exploit almost any natural resource you can think of. 5. You live in the only province that could actually afford to be its own country. 6. The Americans below you are all in anti-government militia groups.
TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN SASKATCHEWAN 1. You never run out of wheat. 2. Your province is really easy to draw. 3. You can watch the dog run away from home for hours. 4. People will assume you live on a farm.
TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN MANITOBA 1. You wake up one morning to find that you suddenly have a beachfront property. 2. Hundreds of huge, horribly frigid lakes. 3. Nothing compares to a wicked Winnipeg winter. 4. You can be an Easterner or a Westerner depending on your mood. 5. You can pass the time watching trucks and barns float by.
TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN ONTARIO 1. You live in the centre of the universe. 2. Your $400,000 Toronto home is actually a dump. 3. You and you alone decide who will win the federal election. 4. You get blamed for everything that happens elsewhere in Canada.
TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN QUEBEC 1. Racism is socially acceptable. 2. You can take bets with your friends on which English neighbour will move out next. 3. Other provinces basically bribe you to stay in Canada. 4. You can blame all your problems on the "Anglo A*#!%!"
TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN NEW BRUNSWICK 1. One way or another, the government gets 98% of your income. 2. You're poor, but not as poor as the Newfies. 3. No one ever blames anything on New Brunswick. 4. Everybody has a grandfather who runs a lighthouse.
TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN NOVA SCOTIA 1. Everyone can play the fiddle. The ones who can't, think they can. 2. You can pretend to have Scottish heritage as an excuse to get drunk and wear a kilt. 3. You are the only reason Anne Murray makes money. (Her first name is really Morna.)
TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND 1. Even though more people live on Vancouver Island, you still got the big, new bridge. 2. You can walk across the province in half an hour. 3. You can drive across the province in two minutes. 4. Everyone has been an extra on "Road to Avonlea." 5. This is where all those tiny, red potatoes come from. 6. You can confuse ships by turning your porch lights on and off at night.
TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN NEWFOUNDLAND 1. If Quebec separates, you will float off to sea. 2. If you do something stupid, you have a built-in excuse. 3. The workday is about two hours long. 4. It is socially acceptable to wear your hip waders to your wedding.
Pass this along to Canadians who need a laugh and foreigners who can learn something about Canada and then enjoy a good chuckle. Let's face it, we're a rare breed.
I have been doing testing on my LifeStream and have been working on different posting methods with both Twitter Feed and Friend Feed. There appears to be a duplicate bug that is posting multiple Twitter entries which would explain why you might be getting duplicate Tweets.
Sorry about that, I will try to keep the duplicates to a minimum.
For the past few months I have been working on my new Lifestream (keithbilous.com) that will essentially replace this blog as my central place of online activity.
While I will continue to use NumberOne SnowStreet as my vehicle for longer blog posts, keithbilous.com will be the "hub" of all of my online activity aggregating the content I post across the internet.
The new site is powered by Sweet Cron and was designed by my good friend Arif. I expect it to go live next week as we take the next few days to do some testing and work through a couple of bugs.
When we do go live, I will be sure to be post an update here.
We will definitely fully refund your ticket for the Montreal conference. As well, I will give you free entrance if you decided to come to Toronto MIXX event in March, 2009.
I`m so sorry that this caused you such an inconvenience. We definitely need to make the fact the conference is in French evident on all of our communications in the future. After 5 years of doing this in the Montreal market we assumed everyone was aware of this.
Again, my sincere apologies. Our Events Mgr. will contact you on Oct 9, to get your credit card to process the reversal.
Sincerely,
Paula Gignac
President, Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada
Class Act in my opinon. I will be there in Toronto in 2009.
