Bloggasm

Here are some media-related links for your amusement:

1. “Journalist escapes death by machetes” — Best headline ever.

2. If you’re a police officer and decide to arrest a guy who is holding a camera and/or a reporter’s notebook, you better make sure you’re arresting him for a good reason. Because that guy is likely a journalist, which means he can open up a whole can of worms if you screw up.

3. Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of Species. xkcd wrote The Origin of Ron Paul Supporters.

4. Oh look, Google has come up with another idea for how to squeeze as much creative juice out of its employees as possible.

5. In yet another sign that the sex industry is going mainstream, Adult Entertainment Expo seminars will be open to porn fans for the first time this week in Las Vegas.

6. I agree with James Fallows. Bill Kristol’s first op-ed at The New York Times is so bland, uninteresting and badly written that I couldn’t even begin to get angry at the actual content of the piece.

7. The New Yorker, my favorite magazine, has a new publisher because of a shake-up at Conde Nast.

8. This is pretty cool. It’s a blog written by a long-dead soldier, the entries written exactly 90 years ago.

9. Speaking of The New Yorker, they published a long feature article this week about how Google is trying to strengthen its influence in DC.

Ok, I was going to wait off another day or two before posting some new links, but some of these are starting to get outdated and will be old news by Friday. So here are some media-related links for your enjoyment.

1. Many of us can remember a time when the only widely-used browser was Netscape, but I almost completely forgot Netscape existed until I read that it’s pretty much closing up shop.

2. Sites like Technorati and Bloglines are notorious for being shut down for hours at a time because of errors and maintenance, but they weren’t the only sites in 2007 to have major outages.

3. Let’s say you’re a striking writer entering a high-class bar after a long day of picketing, and inside the bar are the very producers you’re striking against. There’s only one word to describe your situation: AWKWAAAARRRDDD

4. If you live in Australia and want to look at internet porn, make sure you ask your government nicely first.

5. The New York Times proves in one fell swoop that god is dead. More about their stupid decision over here.

6. Paul E. Steiger writes a departing column for the Wall Street Journal, one in which he pines for the golden days of journalism. This one is actually more entertaining than your normal OMG-newspapers-are-dying column that has become ubiquitous over the past year.

7. Remember that cute girl that sang a song about Digg.com? Well, it looks like her internet fame might result in her getting a record deal.

8. Kudos to Chelsea Clinton for telling a 9-year-old bitch to shove it. For all she knows, that young journalist was a Helen Thomas in training.

9. I can just picture the Gawker Media advertising staff groaning in unison when they found out that they’d have to sell advertising for a…wait for it…blog about science fiction. Something tells me this isn’t a profitable niche.

10. Maybe Tucker Carlson isn’t a gonner after all.

11. Ten obscure Google tricks you didn’t know about.

I’ve noticed for some time now that most media writers ignore the pornography industry completely, even though it makes up a sizable portion of most kinds of media — internet, film, DVD, magazines,television, books. I think that this is a mistake, since an industry that large probably has an influential effect on other kinds of media. Media writers simply pretend that it doesn’t exist.

So in 2008, I intend on covering the industry more often. Certainly not all the time, and this isn’t going to become an X-rated blog or anything…I’ll keep it tasteful. But I think it would be silly to focus so much on online media while simply ignoring all the sex-related google search terms that bring people to this blog.

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Related posts:
1. Lawmakers want to take porn away from sex offenders
2. Porn really does bring in more search engine traffic

This article has a cool behind-the-scenes look at the Australian porn industry, which evidently has been struggling up until now. A woman named Maxine Fensom thinks she can spark world-wide interest and has been flying in US filmmakers to help with her films.

I finally got around to reading my boingboing rss feed and came across a bunch of media related links so thought I’d include them all in one post.

1. Cory gives us a behind-the-scenes look at DRM and how big technology and media companies get pro-DRM rules signed into law.

2. Wired has a cool article about how Jamaican music artists basically invented mash-ups and remix albums because of relaxed copyright law in that country.

3. A researcher figured out that an artist only really profits off his copyrighted work for about 14 years before the copyright is virtually useless.

4. A website that specializes in allowing teens to display webcam video is owned by a porn company. It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that they’re not very good at dealing with parent complaints about inappropriate webcam video popping up on their site.

5. A Sampling of new words and senses from the new 2007 update of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate® Dictionary, Eleventh Edition: “Just two years after a majority of visitors to Merriam-Webster OnLine declared it to be their “Favorite Word (Not in the Dictionary),” the adjective “ginormous” (now officially defined as “extremely large: humongous”), has won a legitimate place in the 2007 copyright update of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate® Dictionary, Eleventh Edition.”

6. A blogger from China could be thrown in jail simply for posting a link to a site with nude pictures.

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Related posts:
1. A History of Amateur Porn
2. Fuck Keith Urban (the singer)
3. The Music Copyright Void
4. Local papers offer web TVcasts

A little while ago, I wrote about the history of amateur porn. In its early days, it was a vibrant business for early online sex enthusiasts who managed to make a load of money shooting in their bedrooms, doing things they’d normally be doing for free anyway.

Now that this trend has caught on, it has become a competitive business. Porn webmasters who have come late to the game doing generic mainstream porn are dying out quickly. Only the strongest survive — recruiting help from ivy league graduates and people who were laid off in the dot-com boom. Because credit card companies are wary of porn sites and will drop them at the first sign of trouble, the sites have to become extremely disciplined and make sure they have few customer complaints.

What’s more, the online industry is trying to change the face of porn and how it’s viewed in the public. More specifically, they’re trying to make people realize that BDSM is not a completely horrible thing, that it’s consensual, that it shouldn’t be outlawed for being obscene.

Read this long detailed article in the New York Times Magazine about the trials and tribulations of one such niche website: Kink.com

My favorite paragraph from the article:

Soon, with Wild Bill tied to his column again, Adams coiled leather twine around his testicles and cinched it tautly to the back of a wooden chair, some feet away. She crouched and flicked him with her finger, hard. I saw Cohen turn away, wrenching his face in what looked like the empathetic cringe men make. But it wasn’t. He was yawning.

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Related posts: Porn really does bring in more search engine traffic, College kids posing nude for campus magazines, Interview with Saskboy from Abandoned Stuff

For years, I’ve read articles that say that having porn-related search items in your posts will increase your traffic dramatically.

The thing is, it’s true. It’s kind of depressing really, that a large chunk of my search engine traffic comes from horny males. Not because I think sex is bad, but because I’d like to think that my writing has more than jack-off appeal. Anyway, here’s some recent google searches that have come my way. I’m sure this post itself will soon become wildly popular:

1. “college nude”
2. “NUDE KIDS” — I’ve been getting lots of these lately, which is scary.
3. “nytimes college porn”
4. “How to get a straight married guy to have sex, with a Bisexual Guy ??”
5. “getting laid”
6. “good sex for christians”
7. “nude magazines”
8. “feminism porn”
9. “local girl looking to get laid”
10. “how to get laid”
11. “free feminist porn”
12. “getting laid chicago”
13. “nsa sex”
14. “sex hook up, houston”
15. “making money making amateur porn”
16. “nude college students”
17. “bi curious first time nervous”
18. “does Heather Shaw do porn”
19. “laid back sex”
20. “nude posing”

I’ll do another update if this post becomes one of my most-searched items.

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Related posts: College kids posing nude for campus magazines, Interview with Tony Pierce from LAist