ReadWriteWeb

Update: The answer to the question in the headline seems to be no, for now.

Following Egypt's severing of its main ISP connections to the Internet, Syria has now reportedly done the same. Possibly anticipating the political wildfire that has leapt from Tunis to Algeria to Libya and now to Egypt, authorities may be trying a preemptive block.

Syria certainly is a candidate for revolt: One of the real tyrants in the Arab world, it possesses an outsized security apparatus, little in the way of citizen rights, a smart, young population and a fear of the Internet.

Will hanging out with the geeks improve network news? Judging from CBS News anchor Katie Couric's comments at the Web 2.0 Expo yesterday, the potential is there.

Will it matter? In a news environment that has been irrevocably disrupted by the Internet, the role of broadcast news anchors has evolved out of necessity. Their ability to focus international awareness on the key issues of our time remains unparalleled, but the attention span and consumption habits of their audience has changed.

And so the question becomes: How will one of the nation's most familiar faces and sources for news will adapt, adopt and become adept in the context of a news cycle that refreshes as often as a click on a Web browser? By the time Couric presents the 22 minutes of news as CBS's anchor each evening, the Web has long since digested, analyzed and commented upon each item. There are few scoops by 6:30 p.m. Eastern.

Last night, YouTube added a new filtering mechanism called "Safety Mode" to the popular video sharing website used by millions. This option allows you to filter out the sort of videos you may find offensive, whether that's those featuring adult content or violence or some other objectionable content. It will even filter out profanity from the YouTube comments.

Using the new setting found at the bottom of any YouTube video page, you can switch Safety Mode on or off. And while parents will certainly be tempted to do so in an attempt to enable parental control mechanisms for the site, they should be warned that even the least tech-savvy youngster can easily shut this new feature in a minute or less.

How do you create filters for the real-time web? From spam filtration to relevant discovery, the "filter geeks" at the Real-Time Web Summit today are all about creating simple, rich user experiences.

Hashtags for Twitter are a great start, but how are the startups moving and shaking the real-time web planning on giving users filters to control their streams in ways that make the ever-increasing volumes of information more usable? From Thing Labs and Twingly to PostRank and SocialText, read on for the problems these companies and their users have encountered and how they plan to solve information overload through clever curation and cooperation.

Has Twitter spam gotten a little out of hand? According to today's top story on Techmeme, it has. Apparently, marketers are calling for Twitter to filter out spam and other adult content from the microblogging service. You know, so their all-important tweets about the products and services they're pushing don't have to share the same web space as that other nasty stuff. But fighting actual spammers is still relatively easy for an end-user: it's called the "unfollow" button.

Ironically, if anyone's to blame for spamming our Twitter timelines, it's the marketers themselves. They've managed to trick our friends into spamming us with their messages instead.

Shyftr made the news last year about their feed reader service which, while similar to Google Reader, triggered alarms about content theft. Since backing off from that idea, it has been working hard on a new product called the Shyftr Filter that also deals with RSS feeds, but in a completely different way. The new service centers around being able to refine just the content you want from RSS feeds by using a flexible set of search tools.

Announced yesterday (with early coverage from Louis Gray), the initial alpha has a public filter that lets anyone test the technology on a group of a few dozen feeds, and a registration-only Publisher area that allows users to add up to 5 of their own feeds to use with Shyfter Filter.

If you like to follow the hottest news at Digg.com and use the Digg RSS feed to do so, you've probably been a little overwhelmed by the number of stories it pumps out. Now there's a simple web app that lets you customize the Digg RSS feed by the minimum number of diggs a story has received. You can then view the stories on the disstill web site or you can subscribe to your new, filtered feed. Sometimes it's little things like this that really make our day.

Joshua Baer (@joshuabaer), founder of OtherInbox, was nice enough to sit down with us this weekend at SXSW Interactive and go over what's new with his company's product. OtherInbox was developed out of a need to intelligently manage the rest of your mail. That is to say, the mail that you might get from mailing lists, shopping sites, and other services but may not actually be from another human. We all get this mail, and to a greater or lesser extent have developed strategies to manage it, but OtherInbox provides a comprehensive and stylish solution. The big news is that the core service is now free of cost.

Feeling information overloaded? No doubt one of the sources of stress in your life are the unread items that await you daily in your RSS reader. No matter how many times you read through your feeds, new items always appear. Perhaps it's time to find a different way to get your news. An experimental Firefox add-on called Ambient News may be able to help.