An observation I’ve wanted to make for awhile, given the right occasion, is that the common practice of nothing that something is not safe for work is the bottom-up, liberal, mature, and responsible analog of content rating (e.g., MPAA ratings).

NSFW is a friend telling you that viewing a link may not be appropriate in some contexts, but use your judgement. Content rating is a bureacracy telling you that viewing of some content by certain people is prohibited and perhaps enforced legally or technologically.

Of course content rating may be used to aid in making an informed choice and NSFW hints could in theory be enforced, but nevertheless I think each’s common use and source is illustrative of something.

The occasion for mentioning this is someone proposing machine-readable NSFW annotation. I don’t have an opinion of the utility of this yet, but it is fun to see a much improved (technically) proposal come just five hours after the first.

Via Tim Lee.