Yafro to facilitate parental control for adult content

On Tuesday I included a brief item about how moblog hosting company Yafro includes a drop-down box that allows viewers to determine whether they want to display moblogs with adult content by indicating "Show" or "Block" (see below).

I wrote that it was a good feature, but didn't deal with the problem of kids being able to view whatever they wanted. James Hong, the co-founder of Yafro (and Hot Or Not), was nice enough to comment that Yafro plans to offer a parental control capability.

He writes, "The plan is to add headers to pages with adult content displayed, such that parental controls installed on those machines will block access to the page.

"In other words, parents still have to do their job of creating a protective environment to shield their children (by means of installing software like NetNanny or by turning on their ISP's parental controls, and we work with them to make sure our content classification works with the tools they use."

Heading off criticism

Bravo to Yafro for trying to come up with a way to helps keep kids from viewing adult content while, at the same time, keeping it for "adults" who want to view it.

At least one other moblog company has a show/block feature. Mobog.com has a "censored" and "uncensored" mode. When clicking on the uncensored mode, you are greeted with a message (see below) that says, "Adult filter will been turned OFF. Some images may contain adult content." You have to click on "I am over 18 and accept images with adult content" to activate the uncensored view.

These efforts also might help ameliorate, in a small way, articles in the press about the adult nature of some moblogs. A Denver Post column about camera phones, for example, was headlined "Camera phones dial up fraud, theft, smut," as I previously wrote.

When I sent an e-mail to the columnist, taking him to task for his one-sided view, he pointed to mobog.com as an example of the "smut" aspect of moblogs.