June 4th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
The Sex Blog Of Record
June 3rd, 2008 -- by Bacchus
Search Engine Goliath, Meet Search Engine David
In making this post, I feel like some guy in 1996 going “there’s this little website called eBay, it’s like an auction but it’s all over the world at once, right now it’s just got a few old lunchboxes and some busted electronics, but I think it could be huge someday!”
First, some background. Nobody I know of is happy with the current search monopoly situation. You search one place because they have the best results, nobody else even comes close. But when those results suck, what can you do? Nothing.
This problem is particularly acute with adult blogs, which often perform poorly in the search engines despite having some of the most detailed textual discussions extant of many sexual issues. There’s presumably a complex of reasons for this, the biggest of which is probably spam. So many porn spammers attempt to game the search engines to promote their sex sites, that the search engine “immune systems” (filters and controls) are quick to kick in when adult search terms are present. There’s also some evidence (endlessly blogged about elsewhere) that the search engines, being corporate, are fairly hostile to sexual material, or at best indifferent to the quality of adult searches.
Anyway, what can be done? The paradigm of automatic crawling plus automated anti-spam filters yields a functional index, but in adult areas the subjective quality of the results often seems low. And, in my experience, the more I know about a search term, the worse the results look to me — there are too many “where is that site, it should be here?” and “that site is just a slick-looking front end for spammy scraped-and-morphed RSS” moments.
Enter Jimmy Wales, the guy (love him or hate him) who was instrumental in making Wikipedia what it is today. He’s been working for quite awhile on using wiki-style user interaction to create better search results than anything available today. It’s an insanely ambitious concept, because the easier you make it for folks to “improve” search results, the easier you make it for them to game them, spam them, and crap all over them in wild orgies of sheerest vandalism. Is it possible for the crowdsourced wiki magic to overwhelm the forces of spam, or at least to fight them to a useful draw? Right now, it seems unlikely. But everybody thought Wikipedia could never be useful, either. That turned out to be dead wrong; for all its manifest flaws, Wikipedia is insanely useful on many topics.
If — please join me in my pipe dream — if only the new Wikia Search (re-released today in open Alpha with, for the first time, useful user-editing features) could produce a user experience that’s competitive with the current search behemoth, wouldn’t that be awesome? It doesn’t have to win or be better — it just needs a fan base and an integer percentage of total search volume, enough to trigger some concern and competition from the corporate search providers. We all know that internet users search for adult stuff (including, but not limited to, porn) a whole lot. Right now, those search outcomes are poor, and nobody in corporate America seems much interested in improving them.
I am hoping that Wikia Search offers a way forward. Why not check it out, play around with the very intuitive tools for improving the results of the searches that you do, see if it isn’t fun to use and fun to improve? (I got sucked in on my first visit; before I knew it, I’d deleted tons of spammy results from several searches and fixed the ugly “snippets” for several favorite sites. I even added a few worthy sites that weren’t showing up. It’s addictively fun, and much easier than working on a Wikipedia article.)
We know the spammers — including the porn spammers — are going to be all over this if it gets any traction. In my (metaphorical) pipe dream, I’m imagining the non-spammy adult web people getting there first, to help build and defend useful search results for adult terms. Idealistic, I know, and pointless if this turns out to be a failed experiment. But imagine the fun if it succeeds!
Here’s the TechCrunch article where I learned of today’s relaunch, and there’s also a short video there explaining how to use the user-modification tools to improve the search results:
Today, Wikia Search is beginning to suck a lot less. It has only indexed 30 million Websites, but it is finally rolling out a set of editing features that lets searchers reorder, add, remove, rate, annotate, and comment on results. It also makes it easier for anyone to try to game the search results. Although, as with Wikipedia, an spammers can be banned by the community. We should see some fierce edit wars on this one.
Here’s Jimmy himself, in Forbes:
Participation in Wikia search has the same incentive as anything online–it’s something people enjoy doing. People edit wikis not because it’s a charity, but because they have common interests and because it’s fun. Also, we’re making the barriers to participation very, very low. If you search for something and find a result that’s not relevant, it’s gone with a single click, and you’ve made the search results a little better.
…
Right now search is a closed box, and there are some plausible reasons for that, like preventing people from gaming the algorithm for commercial gain and keeping out malicious players. But can we create something that’s as open and transparent as possible and publicly accountable? That’s what we’re shooting for.
Two years from now, people may point at this post and go “LOL, whut?” But I’m hoping, instead, that everybody goes “You mean, search used to be done by brainless robots trying to follow clever rules? Wow, that must have really sucked.”
Because, it does.
June 1st, 2008 -- by Bacchus
Comment Spam Of The Day
Reproduced exactly as it appeared this morning in my moderation queue, here’s a comment spam that made me laugh hard:
I FOUND RUBBING KY GELLY WARMING GEL IN THE PENIS AND STROTOM SECTION DAILY HELP INCREASE MY SEXUAL DESIRE,BLOOD FLOW.I GOT THIS REMEDY FROM A DOCTOR IN DETRIOT,MICHIGAN.AT FIRST I WAS SKEPTICAL BUT AFTER ONLY A FEW WEEKS ALONG WITH A DAILY WORKOUT SAW IMPROVEMENTS.SO FELLOWS OUT GIVE IT A TRY!!!
It was linked, of course, to a page selling fake penis pills.
May 31st, 2008 -- by Bacchus
Mark Davis: Strong And Intense
I still remember thinking in my naive pre-internet youth that “kinky stuff” had to be a purely male thing, that “no woman would want that sort of thing”. And of course, from there it would follow that male kinkiness was a sort of dangerous perversion, if it could have no expression with willing partners.
Ah, how little I knew!
Of course, these days anybody who reads sex blogs written by women (as are a large majority of the ones that have, you know, actual words) knows better.
As pointless as it can be for a man to speculate or generalize about the complex mental machineries of female arousal, you ladies should be aware that we still do it. I’m not sure we could refrain from doing it, to be honest; if anything’s hardwired into male behavior, modeling and attempting to game female sexual arousal is probably that thing. And one outcome of all the speculating and generalizing, for me, has been a partial theory of what women enjoy about rough kinky sex, bondage, and BDSM — really, that whole spectrum of sexuality that doesn’t quite fit the traditional hearts-and-flowers romance model.
I haven’t got time for a thousand words, so how about a picture?
It’s from Sex And Submission, and the rest of the shoot has plenty of ropes and gags and whips and toys and power-tool vibrators and bondage blowjobs and complex rigging with pulleys and all of the other overcomplicated gadgetry that men bring to the hobbies they really enjoy. But this one picture, I think, captures the essence of what’s in it for the ladies. Sometimes (maybe often, but I’m still trying not to overgeneralize here) women want to feel like a strong man like Mark Davis wants them, wants them so intensely that his own “better impulses” and socially-conditioned docility are just overwhelmed by his desire and lust for them. And they enjoy the idea, perhaps embodied in the photo above, that such a man will simply grab them and do what he will — because for the woman, that outcome is the ultimate proof of her own irresistible sexual attraction and desirability.
Where fantasy and reality differ, of course, is that a strong man who lacks that much self-control is dangerous — he cannot safely be allowed within about thirty miles of any human settlement. But a trustworthy man who can still project that aura of dangerous uncontrolled lust? He, it turns out, is a popular fellow indeed.
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May 30th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
Beefcake
Ladies, you want beefcake?
I’ll give you beefcake, with ropes:
Shamelessly stolen from Bondage Blog.
May 29th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
Tasting Mrs. Filbert
I’m really not sure what I can say that would be useful about this vintage margarine advertisement. Except of course, the obvious: When I see the phrase “taste the sweeter flavor a woman makes”, I’m not thinking about margarine. My guess is, even in ninteen-fifty-whatever, neither was Mr. Filbert, who was probably laughing his ass off for the entire time this ad was in national distribution:
Via Vintage Ads.
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May 28th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
Stripping For The Wolf Whistles
This story is interesting — an Israeli woman in New Zealand took offense at the wolf whistles from some construction workers, so she shut them up by stripping off all her clothes before going about her business at an ATM machine.
The interesting part is that she’s the one who got a trip to the police station. Apparently in New Zealand, harassing women on the street is considered normal and acceptable by the cops, but being naked is not:
“She was taken back to the police station and spoken to and told that was inappropriate (behavior) in New Zealand,â€? Police Sgt. Peter Masters said.
I’m not slamming New Zealand here; I can easily imagine this same reaction in many a U.S. town. But it does seem a touch old-fashioned, no?
Story via Naked Protesters.
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