Valleywag
100-word version
100-word version
sex trade
Yes, there's sex online after 50
The 50-and-up set form one of the fastest growing demographics of those looking for love online. That nugget of hope, care of former Match.com CEO Jim Safka, comes tucked into Newsweek's Sex & the Single Boomer. While the Youngs, who've been barely weaned off of cruising Facebook for casual sex, may eyeroll at Web 1.0 matchmaking, and the Olds themselves scoff at the profitability of Web-based matchmaking, it looks they're going at it as sure as the kids today, with their Twitter hookups and their 150-mile-radius locally sourced organic condoms. The real difference? Baby boomers got over talking about it decades ago. (Photo via foundphotos)
sex trade
On Facebook, nobody knows you're not a whore
The only thing worse than having potential johns ringing your mobile at all hours? Not actually working in the sex industry, but having the same call-screening woes. 23-year-old Brit Kerry Harvey knows all too well, and she blames not the poor manners of the punters, but Facebook, for allowing a fakester profile using her photo, actual date of birth, and phone number, listing her occupation as Prostitute. Boys, are we 12? More »
Full Disclosure
The Valleywag-Boing Boing sex map
"Did you sleep with Violet Blue? I can't keep track," my editor IM'd me. He's not nosy; he's just trying to stay on top of things. To help him — and you — out, I've dashed off this sex map of l'affaire Boing Boing, including my own involvement. (Why didn't Xeni Jardin just do this in the first place? In retrospect, that seems easier than taking the abuse she's now getting.) Jardin thinks blogging one's personal life is "stupid," but then, I get to report for an operation where my seriously gay editor factchecks the difference between "lesbian" and "girl-on-girl." And if we're fucking the people we're reporting on, we'll tell you. So no, I did not sleep with Violet Blue. Even though she asked. More »
Boing Boing
Did the Internet's free-speech guardians try to hush up a girl-on-girl love affair?
As new media gets big, it remains small at heart — and not in a good way. Boing Boing, the popular tech-culture blog, has offered a tardy defense of its mass deletion of posts mentioning a sex blogger from its archive, and it amounts to this: Because Boing Boing started as a personal blog, it's entitled to be as petty, as hypocritical, and as inconsistent as a 14-year-old girl with a MySpace page. Never mind the fussing about so-called "censorship" — though one would be sure that, had this happened at another website, we'd be reading all about it at Boing Boing, with its editors in a righteous nerd froth. The excuse that "it's personal" would ring more true if we weren't talking about a media enterprise whose audience exceeds that of Conde Nast's Epicurious.com, or the publicly traded finance site TheStreet.com. While Boing Boing's revenues are unknown, the site formed the cornerstone of Federated Media, an online-advertising startup which has already made founder John Battelle — Boing Boing's "band manager" — a multimillionaire. Oh, and did we mention that Violet Blue, the sex blogger in question (and contributor to Gawker Media's Fleshbot), shown here at right, used to be the lover of Boing Boing editor Xeni Jardin, left? More »
12:00 PM on Tue Jul 1 2008
By Melissa Gira Grant
16,314 views,
29 comments
Latest by metaphorge: This is probably the wrong place to make this point, but I think its worth stating: no matter how silly the reasoning behind the "unpublish" decision turns out to be (and I'm fairly certain it will turn out to be more »
sex trade
What Craigslist can and can't do about "daughters selling their bodies"
After last week's FBI sting conducted in concert with local law enforcement, in which 389 arrests netted 21 underage prostitutes, including four in Sacramento, Craigslist is again in the sex-panicked spotlight. In a familiar routine, law enforcement give stories of how they use the site's Erotic Services section to launch investigations, and CEO Jim Buckmaster gives good onscreen time in voicing the Craigslist company line that it is aiding in efforts to monitor teen prostitution: More »
Politics
Obama campaign wunderkinds Blue State Digital could use new names
Visiting Barack Obama's social network is like taking home the nice, all-natural hippie deodorant you know is better for you. Only it's on the internet, and they want you to invite your friends, and his campaign is really damn proud of it — and all of their "social media" efforts — having only cost them $1.1 million but raised $200 million and thousands of volunteers. But if Blue State Digital's electioneering effort was so successful, why has no pointed out the hilarity in naming the destination site MyBO? We would have been using that punchline for months now.
Collegehumor
Special girl-run Internet will be porn-free, but still quite pink
CollegeHumor, the Internet's most unlikely feminist website? They've originated the homosocially delicious Jake and Amir Show, had a breakaway hit with the sex worker rights' paean "Moments Before 2 Girls 1 Cup," in which workplace health and safety for adult models takes center stage, and now have reimagined the Internet as if girls ran it. The only problem is — and this might even be due to the success of CollegeHumor and their comrades in boy-funny — girls mostly already do. More »
Facebook
Happy Transgender Pride from Facebook!
Facebook announced today that even though users are now required to specify their gender on the site, it is still possible to "remove gender entirely from your account." The impulse behind the change is part grammatical — a stream of "thems" in the NewsFeed has gotten old, and can now read "him" and "her" — but with the opting-out option in place, it's also a graceful move to acknowledge that, as Facebook product manager Naomi Gleit put it, "the male-female distinction is too limiting." And the tiny checkbox gender revolution comes just in time for tonight's third annual Transgender Pride March in San Francisco. Vive la Différence! (Photo via Genderfork)
sex trade
In the "Wild West" of Craigslist's Erotic Services, does community policing prevail?
On the sex worker message board mypinkbook, escorts are working their nerves over some messy moderation on the Craigslist help forums. Like when one woman's ad got flagged for being "a little hookerish." Pot, kettle, black patent pumps, we know. The escort, DameKelly, shares the now-deleted Craigslist moderator response: More »
Team Party Crash
Live from the Girl Geek Dinner
Our correspondent Melissa Gira and former contributor Megan McCarthy have successfully infiltrated the controversial Girl Geek Dinner, and pictures will be plentiful if this first photograph is any indication. Updates as they come in via SMS. More »
Geeks Gone Wild
Only millennials get Random Play on Facebook
If you were over 30 years old when you signed up for Facebook, you never got the option to look for "Random Play" — that's what the "kids" are calling it now. Sheryl Sandberg's new No Fun regime at Facebook has taken it a step further: They've removed the Random Play option from some people, including me, who'd already checked it. Now all users' inner sluts have been caged, at least as far as the interface is concerned. More »
12:20 PM on Thu Jun 26 2008
By Melissa Gira Grant
3,252 views,
12 comments
Latest by random_play: This is an outrage! How will anyone now know the subtle hipster douchebaggery of random_play? Am I to devolve into a short-lived VH1 comedy series starring Stephen Colbert? To say nothing of the cupcakes! + Watch video more »
Geek Love
Valleywag fetishist seeks same on Craigslist
Our secret girl admirer writes, "The perfect, shared Sunday for me would consist of..." among other things, fighting over the Sunday Times and fondling iPhones. After an art flick, "[w]e could catch up on blogs like Valleywag and TechCrunch." Ooh, dreamy! As the only one on the masthead with a scant few degrees of sexual separation from both blogs' founding editors, I have some words of — well — we have not even begun to overshare. More »
private equity
AdultVest takes home trophy for banking on iPorn
AdultVest, an investment bank for adult entertainment businesses, is poised to snag a little trophy at tonight's "Oscar-style" 6th Annual Hedge Fund Industry Awards. The firm, which claims to have $7 billion in available capital in its network, is nominated in the "Hedge Fund Launch of the Year" category. Their most notable acquisition is iPorn.com — in a move that's pure online speculation, they bought the domain name only, without a lick of content.
Startups
When they were babes: Web 2.0's humble paper origins
Aww, you guys, this is so cute. Making actual babies out of Web people didn't go so well, but these larval stage sketches of popular Web 2.0 sites before they spawned? Adorable. Look, Vimeo was a little funny looking even then! Taken as a whole, it kinda makes you want to pinch someone's Moleskine where it counts. Full-on prototyping-porn after the jump. More »
Lawsuits
Now we know, thanks to Google: Floridians "as interested in apple pie as orgies"
In defending the website cumonherface.com from obscenity charges, attorneys are leaning on Google Trends to prove their case. What can make porn illegal — being classified as obscene material, for one — is its bucking of "community standards of decency." This is just the first instance of lawyers showing up in court with some Google-gleaned data to demonstrate that curiosity about ejaculation in and around the cheeks and mouth is as American as apple pie. More »
All quiet on the Twitter front
A serene photo essay captures the Twitter office in tiny Tweetable moments: "listening to cat power, coding your scoble." [MIT Technology Review]
MORE » 
Ashley Dupre
Ashley Alexandra Dupré approves your friend request!
The internet's favorite escort, Ashley Alexandra Dupré, wants to apologize for taking so long to approve your Friend Request on MySpace. "All of my pending friend requests from 3/12 through now were deleted by myspace (if you do not approve them within a certain number of days, they get deleted) so...please please please re-send and you should be approved automatically." We forgive, you, Ms. Dupré — we know you were busy. And shame on you, MySpace, for interfering with a working woman's self-promotion by blocking those friend requests.
Social Networks
Advertisers fighting with your friends and neighbors' sex lives for attention on Facebook
It's not Ning's porn-sharing communities, Facebook's co-ed antics, and MySpace's ninja sex angel users that prevent these social networking sites from making as much money off ads as hoped. It's the issue of getting quality attention with each insertion, writes Bryant Urstadt for the MIT Technology Review. He doesn't blame the "rude content" (you know, what the users do) or the advertisers getting skittish about running a banner adjacent to the list of people you've slept with. It's not users being naughty that's the problem — it's that no one knows how to sell against "bad behavior" yet. More »
Glam.com
Glam.com CEO so pretty in pink
He says he invented the term "website," practices zazen meditation, and would have us believe he would accessorize his custom tailored duds with pink even if it weren't the official color of his Web site. In a gushy profile of girly ad platform Glam.com's founder Samir Arora by the London Times, Arora's over-glossed sense of worth is rivaled only by the rumored $1.3 billion price tag on his company. Which, by the looks of the press rampage Glam is on, is as bolstered by frothy tidbits of their founder's "glam" lifestyle as it is by the slippery story that Glam has cornered the women's market online — which they haven't.
Craigslist
Would an in-house attorney keep Craigslist in line?
Hookers and eBay, shares and cops. If Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster, had an attorney on staff with them, would that have prevented questionable legal moves by the founder and CEO of the world's most reliable housemates and hookups platform? More »
Nerdfight
Zivity sparks Girl Geek porn panic
Cyan Banister's Zivity seemed a natural choice to participate at the second Bay Area Girl Geek dinner, a networking event celebrating women in tech. At the last one in January, over 600 guests assembled at Google's HQ to hear tales of ladypower from female CEOs, founders, engineers, and VCs. Banister, a former systems administrator and network engineer, is the cofounder of Zivity, a social networking site driven by female users sharing sexy photos of themselves. The Zivity motto is "It's not porn." Call what you will pretty women getting paid for making and posting naked photos of themselves. As Zivity's Chief Strategy Officer, Banister was honored to accept the Girl Geeks' invite over five months ago, including their idea to have Zivity bring two female photographers along to lens red-carpet style shots of arriving guests who were up for it. This is where the cocktail of sex, girls, tech, and cameras got complicated, and the collective panties of some female industry "thought leaders" got blogged into a painful bunch. And it had about nothing to do with porn. More »
sex trade
No priority shipping for escorts, not yet, anyway
If TheEroticReview.com is "Amazon.com for prostitutes" (as dubbed by Matt Richtel in the New York Times), do customers get "free delivery for orders over $100", asks Salon.com's Broadsheet. We agree with Salon's assessment — TER is really more like Yelp — unless there's some exciting new feature to Amazon Prime that the Times was briefed on under embargo.
Conferences
Loic Le Meur goes spelunking for the mythical g-spot in Seesmic demo
$1795 a head is a lot to pay for a sex ed lesson, let alone a tech conference, so why not combine the two? That was apparently the idea behind "Liquid Conversations" at Supernova, which nearly ran off the rails when panelist Loic Le Meur demonstrated his startup Seesmic, which the ebullient founder describes as "
Conferences
Kongregate's Jim Greer, on how to get a girl-crazy VC to commit
In this morning's otherwise sleepy session the "brave new world" of entrepreneurship at Supernova, Vipin Jain of Retrevo offered the analogy first — that for startups, attracting venture capital is like dating. "When you first start there’s some excitement. Then, the unknown!" Jim Greer, CEO of the epic timewasting Flash-game site Kongregate jumped in: More »
Quotable
Esther Dyson: Online advertising will "turn good people into prostitutes"
Esther Dyson, one of the 28 women counted at today's Supernova conference, responding to Bob Iannucci of Nokia in a conversation on the challenges of making money off of emerging networks of users, urged businesses to "appeal to people's pride rather than their avarice" or else they risk "turning good people into prostitutes." When Iannucci replied that "a market is just a language," Dyson extended her metaphor to herself, and to Dopplr, a trip-sharing social network. "I give up my travel information for free on Dopplr," she explained. Dyson is an investor in Dopplr. Does that make her a pimp who gives out freebies? (Photo via esthr)
sex trade
