The company continues to offer more services and is also expanding worldwide.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [October 27, 2008]

Bob Dahlstrom is the founder of BluePrint Data and KIDSNET. The original organization, KIDSNET, provides a list of safe websites for children. The lists are built by human beings, not by error-prone filters, and are very good, but KIDSNET operates more like a non-profit than like a business.

Nowadays, BluePrint Data brings in the cash that allows Dahlstrom to fund the labor-intensive activity of reviewing websites. BluePrint Data focuses on enterprise and ISP customers, while KIDSNET serves schools and provides information about related offerings, such as an online guide to handling school violence.

BluePrint Data's mission statement is simple: "To provide the highest level of internet content protection and security to all internet users."

The company builds lists for ISPs and UTM equipment manufacturers and also has a line of appliances, the BluePrint Data Enterprise Edition Internet Filtering Appliances (BPDEE).

Currently, BluePrint Data is adding languages, expanding geographically. "Until recently, our customers were predominantly English and Spanish speakers," says Dahlstrom. "We recently added Japanese and will soon add Chinese."

When BluePrint Data adds a language, it hires a large number of web reviewers for a short period of time, perhaps six months, and then retains the best of them for the long term.

Dahlstrom says that there's a kind of 80-20 rule, where 20 percent of the sites generate 80 percent of the traffic. It's easy to obtain lists of the most popular websites for any language, but BluePrint Data supplements those lists with sites flagged by beta testers in the new language.

Fighting phishing
Whereas the company started out with a list of sites that are safe for kids, it now has two more lists: a list of known malware sites, and a list of known phishing sites.

So how does your list compare to the other lists an ISP might obtain? "A lot of anti-phishing lists gather their data from the same sources," says Dahlstrom. "The two sources we use our Paypal and eBay, which maintain fraud units and make available for free lists of phishing sites, all as a service to protect their customers. We use those lists and others and we gather own information and do our own malware testing."

The system uses the lists that other providers use and augments them by tracking down sites reported by BluePrint Data users.

Dahlstrom hopes that ISPs will take advantage of the promotion to use his list and will then be impressed by it when they compare it to whatever they're currently using.

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