The PICS project was begun in mid-1995 and adopted as a standard in May 1996. If you're interested in its ongoing technical development, you might also want to visit the W3 area about PICS.

PICS wasn't designed as a self-censoring tool. The PICS project intentionally did not define rating criteria, voting instead to create a judgement-free technology for supporting whatever ratings criteria individuals or groups want to use. This approach gives the PICS meta tags a hook for ranking site content in a variety of ways and there is talk that the PICS meta tags could become an additional tool for building search indices and directories.

Judgmental ratings which conform to the PICS technical specs are currently offered by the non-profit Recreational Software Advisory Council (RSAC) and by the for-profit company Safe Surf. It is likely that others will also offer ratings codes in the near future.

Companies like IBM are also lining up behind the PICS standard. IBM recently announced its reasoning for embracing PICS—if you want to read about it directly from the Big Blue, visit IBM's magazine articles archives and search for PICS.

Each group devises its own rating scale and generates a meta tag for your site that ranks your content based on its criteria. At RSAC, you'll answer detailed questions about the scope of sex, nudity, language and violence in your site. At the end of the questionnaire, the ratings system will assign you scores in each of the four categories. At Safe Surf, the rating scheme uses 10 categories, including profanity, heterosexual themes, homosexual themes, nudity, violence, sex/violence/profanity, intolerance, glorification of drug use, other adult themes, and gambling. Likewise, it will assign ratings data based on your responses.

No one comes in and rates your site for you; you simply answer the questions and the service translates those responses into a set of ratings.