Kids keeping the Web clean

by Michelle Chihara

As part of a crusade against banner ads and other info-clutter on the Web, the ArsDigita Foundation in Cambridge will reward a group of teenagers for helping to keep the Internet noncommercial and annoyance-free.

ArsDigita, a nonprofit organization funded by the multimillion-dollar Web company of the same name, put up several cash prizes -- including a $10,000 grand prize -- for teenagers who have created useful and innovative Web sites. Eight finalists have been chosen from among thousands of entries submitted through photo.net, a site run by foundation president Philip Greenspun. The prizes will be awarded on Friday at MIT.

"The Web used to be, and still is -- if you can wade through all the consumer stuff and the banner ads -- a great place to learn," says Greenspun.

To Greenspun, though, there's more at stake than surfing in peace. "These 15-, 17-, 18-year-old kids really represent a way out of the stagnation that the commercial software industry has plunged users into since the 1970s," he says. Greenspun blames companies like Microsoft for the expensive and clunky software that most of us run on our PCs; the finalists' sites, by contrast, are mostly elegant and ingenious pieces of programming. (An example is "Escalation," a teaching tool created by a student in Wenham, which simulates the decision-making process behind the Vietnam War. See www.escalationsim.com.)

No surprise, perhaps, that the kind of collaborative open-source work for which the kids are being rewarded is strikingly similar to the work of ArsDigita (the company), which produces software to help employees collaborate on projects. But in the broader technological battle between clean open-source programming and the clunky proprietary software that Microsoft peddles, it's nice to see someone recruiting soldiers to fight the good fight.