I believe that it might be difficult to use a safe net vendor, as they are structured to handle sites rather than filtering within a site. However, if they have some way of cataloguing bits of content and giving your scripts feedback on whether a page contains it, that would probably work.

I like my idea of a Google-like filtering preference, but I don’t know the best way to implement it. The danger of filtering at least some content by default is that you might filter out some entire stores - not a good way to get people to create stores.

This calls for experimentation. I’d start with a link that is placed on pages that return (from the safe net vendor) marked content that says something like “Filter this type of content for me”. Save it in a cookie. Then on pages that would have returned marked content, have “Show filtered content” or somesuch. Could all by dynamic HTML - very fast and responsive.

If you can’t get the safe net vendor thing to work, you could probably task someone to mark it… I suppose it would be somewhat subjective - hence the advantage of working with the vendor.

If the link didn’t work, maybe grab one of the various, recognizable ratings things and have it show up on a page with such content. It could even be a sort of disappearing watermark - flash it when the page first displays, then minimize it down to the link that makes the filter active. Animation shown only once a session/user.

God Bless,
- Matt

Thanks for the feedback. This is great, and yes, you are hitting on exactly the idea behind our shop partner functionality. The great thing too is that we can offer even more functionality if you want to let people design their own, including white and black lists if that’s needed.

And, I agree we need to be able to work in a more family friendly way when people want. What’s the best way of doing that? Should we work w/ one of the safe net vendors? What is your feedback on that?

Thanks!
Jana

Next the good - as you know, my mind won’t turn off until I think of a solution… so I thought of virtual stores. “Hmmm… I wonder if they are already doing that?” Yep. Good show. Also, maybe a preference setting similar to Google’s Safe Search: default to a middlin’ setting.

And, of course, as I think of one idea, more come to mind… the Spreadshirt Store Kiosk. Hmmm… I have a touch screen in the basement… Be totally cool. A kiosk for brick-and-mortars where people could design a shirt. I know that such a kiosk in my local Christian bookstore would do very brisk business. Maybe that’s what I’ll do on my next long weekend off :-)