Butt Sex IS Awesome!

Apparently, Microsoft is censoring posts on its new blog hosting website, MSN Spaces. Check out Boing Boing's thoroughly entertaining investigation here. Their conclusions?

• You can't name a blog Corporate Whore (but Corporate Prostitute is fine).
• You can, in fact, name your blog Butt Sex is Awesome, which I'll admit is way better than Crushed by Inertia. Also, the word "anal" is banned, which is odd, because that's basically a medical term that naughty people have co-opted.
• Most of the seven dirty words are out, but "tits" apparently is okay if used in conjunction with "or tat" or "-mouse."
• The word pornography is apparently off limits
• You can post something with the title "Smoking Crack: A Guide for Teens."

Funny stuff.

Of course, it's funny because it's so ridiculous. The entire point of blogging is that you can communicate directly with other people. You can express yourself. You can say whatever you want! Get it, Bill Gates? Once you start forcing people to conform their language to a corporate-sponsored website's specifications, you cut off the very free expression of ideas your service was designed to foster. Dumbass!

I really hope that this MSN Spaces thing doesn't catch on, although I'm sure it will, because they have more money than sites like Blogger, and they'll just cheat and make Internet Explorer crash whenever you don't already have MSN Spaces open at Start-Up. Bastards.

Really, it's just like cable television. The Internet is not free; you have to pay to get it in your home. I can't just bring a computer home and plug it into the wall and start getting blogs on the screen, right? So, just like on cable, it's up to individual content providers to decide what they want to put on their TV station/website, and Microsoft has decided to go the coward's way out and censor words like "anal" from their blogs. They're the Comedy Central of the blogosphere, free to say or do anything they want, but terrified to allow some offensive term like "doobie" to possibly sneak in during a Cheech and Chong movie marathon.