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The Sex Blog Of Record
Thursday, March 21st, 2013 -- by Bacchus
I have watched with interest the reports of Violet Blue and many others from the SXSW cultural festival in Austin every year. I’ll never go, I don’t think, not when even the Super 8 charges $800 a night (which is the rumor I heard this year on Twitter); but there’s much that happens there that’s relevant to my interests, including this set of closing remarks by Bruce Sterling:
I won’t play Debbie Downer in this space by sharing his trenchant remarks on the state of blogging, but felt I had to transcribe his broad-strokes view of the effect digital disruption is having on our prosperity:
Now, most of you in here are not novelists. I’m not complaining that novelists are disrupted and are very badly off, although we are. What I’m telling you is that you’re more disrupted. You are worse off. Whatever happens to musicians happens to everybody, including you.
People like to say that musicians reacted badly to the digital revolution, that they put a foot wrong. What really happened is that the digital revolution reduces everybody to the state of musicians. Everybody! Not just us Bohomian creatives, but the military, political parties, the anchor stores and retail malls, academics subjected to massive open online courses. It’s the same thing over and over! Basically the only ones making money are the ones who have big legal stone castles surrounded with all kinds of regulatory thorns, meaning: the sickness industry, the bank gangsters, and the military contractors. Gothic high tech.
If more computation and more networking was going to make the world prosperous, we’d be living in a prosperous world. And we’re not! Obviously, we’re living in a depression.
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Thursday, January 3rd, 2013 -- by Bacchus
One of the many ways Bruce Sterling is brilliant is his ability to churn out useful analogies. In this interview he explains the ephemeral nature of blogging in a way that resonates strongly with me:
I’m a blogger and I’m very keen on randomly-assembled narrative chunks, but I’ve always known that blog content has a short shelf-life. It’s like doing stand-up comedy.
Just so. I take him to mean that a blog post has a moment and a context and an intended audience. Even if it “works” on the moment it’s delivered, it isn’t designed or intended to make sense or offer amusement a year later. Sometimes, though serendipity, it may; but that’s neither the intention nor (usually) the outcome.
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Sunday, September 4th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
In which somebody is “doing it right, actshully…”
I have devoted quite a few blog posts to the stunning failures of people who try to market to bloggers, but don’t know how. Complete with pictures of failboats, failing.
In the almost-a-decade I’ve been blogging, I’ve also encountered a few people who do it right. It’s rare, but it happens. Unfortunately, it’s harder to explain what “right” is. There’s a hefty component of “sending me stuff I want, no strings” to it, but even doing that, people screw up more often than you would think. It’s useful to communicate in advance to make sure I might want the stuff, it’s necessary to actually send the stuff, it’s vital to send it to the place specified using a delivery service that will actually deliver to that place even if it is not your preferred drop shipper, and on top of all that, it’s essential that the process not become so convoluted that I already hate you before the stuff arrives. (It’s also pretty bad for your brand if, after various promises that stuff is on the way, nothing ever gets here. Negative bonus points if you fail to deliver on more than one occasion. I’m looking at you, Liberator sex cushions people.) But none of that gets to the core of the problem: a non-fail marketing process of this sort has to start with figuring out something the blogger wants, needs, lusts after, or most importantly will use with an enthusiasm that naturally turns into passionate, unsolicited blogging about the product. That’s the goal, that’s the holy grail, that’s how you know you did it right. And it’s hard. You’ve got to have a worthy product, you’ve got to identify people who will love it once they’ve seen it, and you’ve got to do this lots and lots of times in order to get a few of the unsolicited, passionate, positive blog posts you’re looking for.
But when it works? Totally worth it.
And here’s my example that inspires today’s post. Bruce Sterling is a futuristic science fiction writer whose blogging, like his fiction, is so rich with ideas that it tends to make my head explode. He blogs at Wired.com, and his link is on my very small blogroll of “nothing to do with the sex blog community but I want the link here handy because these are links I visit really often and don’t want to lose and I think other people will like them too” links.
Typically, he does not blog about pants.
But, if you send him the right pants, it turns out he will. And such a blog about pants! I cannot imagine a better marketing return on investment than this blog post about pants.
It turns out he doesn’t even prefer this particular model of the pants over the old model he was wearing before the new model got there. But no matter. His wife likes them better, and he acknowledges the merit of this feature. What more could any maker of pants desire in a recommendation?
That, boys and girls, is how you market to and through a blogger.
But it gets better! Blogs inspire conversation. If you’re a marketer, you want folks talking about your stuff. Bruce Sterling’s post about pants was sufficiently interesting, another science fiction author on my blogroll saw fit to link to it (with a clever title borrowed from a Nick Park movie) from another high-traffic blog, calling it
…a fascinating exegesis on the design of outdoors wear, the role of clothing fashion in William Gibson’s recent work, and the similarities between the use case for trouser choice among cops and SF writers.
Which is a true and fair description. Also, an example of the rewards of ambition. I’m sure people have given (or tried to give) an enormous amount of shit to Bruce Sterling over the years in hopes he would write about it the way he blogged about the pants. And most of them have failed … as evidenced by the fact that he doesn’t write about stuff in general all that often. But the winner of that vicious Darwinian winnowing — the people who actually make pants worth writing about, and actually managed to get them on Bruce Sterling’s ass — have earned a magnificent and ever-expanding payback for their marketing efforts. That’s what internet marketing aspires to accomplish, but so rarely does.
That’s how to do it right.
The irony? This kind of marketing is completely unavailable to the people who don’t start with an excellent product to market. Too many web marketing people, in particular, think marketing is something you use to sell baskets of steaming shit. “We don’t care about the product, the product doesn’t matter if the marketing team does its job…” Nah, doesn’t work on the internet. If the product is shit (I’m looking at you, cookie-cutter generic white-label sex toy “stores”) you’ll never get a marketing payback as good as Bruce Sterling writing about pants.
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Thursday, October 14th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
I like to read Bruce Sterling’s Beyond the Beyond blog for its glimpse into his favela-chic future. There, most everybody is poor, the whole world is a squat, and the people we now mostly aspire to be (the college-educated info-worker lucky few with white collar jobs or better — you know, the folks who have a shot at actually being wealthy while calling themselves middle class, the ones who can go to a doctor without financial stress, the ones who get to go to a dentist when their teeth don’t hurt yet) are trying to adjust to the culture shock of discovering themselves to be just another wretched class of pixel-stained technopeasantry.
Perhaps you ride the “no silver linings, no lemonade” bus with Douglas Coupland, or maybe you prefer to hope that people will pull together and Make some fun among the rubble (see A Happy Mutant’s Guide To the Near Future by Jim Leftwich, which struck me, though not so billed, as a direct response to the Douglas Coupland piece, and tasted very Sterling-ish to my tentacles). Either way, though, the point of the future is that it’s supposed to be happening tomorrow. Today, we still expect to find our knowledge workers chasing that 20th-century rainbow, not farming WOW gold elbow-to-elbow with a roomful of Chinese gamerboyz or working as a manual blog comment spamming robot.
Yes, boys and girls, that’s what has precipitated this morning’s rant. Recent improvements in my back-end blog technology have nuked most of the automated blog comment spam that used to plague me; at one point, I was having to clear five or six hundred robot spams a day from the moderation queue. These were machine generated texts, usually starting from some base text and then auto-morphed with a synonym replacement algorithm; so they looked like real comments but read like nonsense. It was annoying, and in bulk, taxing — but at least I understand the economics of robot spam. I hate it, but I understand it. And, I can fight it with better software. Battle won.
Of course we have always had people who would drop by and leave a comment for the sole purpose of dropping their URL in the box provided. With Google’s NoFollow, this is pretty pointless; but maybe they get a few clicks of traffic, and it happens. If the comment is real and the URL looks normal, there’s no way to avoid it, either. Fortunately people like this are usually lazy and/or greedy; there are usually obvious spam keywords in the link, and (it used to be) they would be unable or unwilling to spend the time to write a decent comment. So we’d get “Haha, nice pic!” and a link to some buy-my-penis-pills-now site from a first time commenter, not hard to nuke from first-time-commenter moderation.
No, boys and girls, what’s new in the last six months, and growing rapidly, is the seemingly hand-rolled comment spam that is so good it cannot be distinguished from the comments my regular commenters leave. It’s two or three sentences long, it’s on topic, it’s friendly, it’s fun, it would in every respect qualify for being passed through moderation. Except that it’s clearly been submitted in order to support a horrid spammy link. Instead of putting a name in the link box, the person will put whatever keyword they are trying to promote their site for in the search engines; and then they will put their keyword-laden URL in the URL box.
These happen with increasing frequency now. The sites are of all kinds, the emails and IP addresses differ, the commenting styles seem to differ, it has not seemed like just one person doing it. I’ve been open to the idea that there’s one “work from home” ring of people doing it in support of some solitary Black Hat SEO evil mastermind, but it’s been hard to believe they would actually be getting paid enough to make it worth their time. And given what I think I know about search engines these days, I don’t think this behavior makes economic sense. But the world changes rapidly, and one of the “features” is that what you think you know often turns out not to be so.
And so it would go, ever since my tech improvement made most of the automated stuff vanish from my site. I’d see one or two of these hand-rolled comment spams in my moderation queue every so often, I’d marvel at them as I nuked them, and then I would get on with my life.
Until this morning. One of these comments, on a post from 2007, seemed very familiar…
Light dawns on Marble Head. Ding ding ding ding!
Clever robot, have a pellet.
Challenge: You need a comment text good enough to convince a blog owner it was written by a human in response to a post on his blog. Where do you get one?
Duh answer: You just steal the comment text from the existing comment thread, and then you rely on the blog owner’s bad memory not to recognize that he’s already seen that comment years previously. On a blog with “only” 13,989 approved comments, what are the odds he’s going to remember the one you borrowed?
The reason this works so well — and had me convinced for a month I was dealing with pixel-stained technopeasant wretches — is that all of the comments were good enough to approve. Of course they were! Because they’d all been approved before, duh. The robot is well crafted in several ways. Not only is it smart enough to get around the ice that’s keeping most of the robots away from my site now, it’s set to stay several years in the past, hit my site no more than two or three times a day, generally not more than two or three times a week. But (I discover on looking in the spam bin) it always works by taking the first comment from the comment thread and attempting to repost it with its own spammy link.
As humbled as I am to discover that I’ve spent the last month failing to recognize the robot on the other side of the Turing Test, I’ll confess to a bit of relief that the world of bulk hand-crafted comment spam hasn’t arrived (yet).
{pause for breath}
That’s the end of the post, but if you’re still reading this deep into one of my ranty posts that has nothing to do with sex, I figure you’ll indulge me further. When I went to Boing Boing for those two links that I used in the second paragraph, I thought it was a sign of the apocalypse that there was nothing visible “above the fold” but their header banner and advertising, thusly:
Given that I’ve been considering a few tweaks to the ErosBlog template to modernize the look and create some of the larger ad spaces that advertisers are looking for these days, I was wondering whether I should take that as an omen. I hope I’ll never go that far (shudder) but if one can get away with that and still enjoy the cool reputation Boing Boing enjoys, maybe I’ve been too conservative?
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Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 -- by Bacchus
Just another night chez Violet Blue. Invite a few friends over, then before you know it, there’s a porn shoot going on in your apartment:
On friday I got a couple of emails from Jiz Lee and Courtney Trouble saying that their planned location for a porn shoot had fallen through at the last minute, and could they use my living room? As if I’d say no. But to sweeten the deal, they told me I’d not only be able to hang out and take photos but that it was okay to blog the experience – plus, I told them, I had a few friends who were going to be hanging out with me that night, and they said that it was cool for my friends to be there too. Bonus!
…
It was all girl-girl, and I think four girls fucked each other in my bed.
I now have a love-hate relationship with my own bed. It is a very lucky bed. Remember the New Years’ incident? That damn bed gets way more action than I do, and I never seem to be in the room when it happens. Even my laptop was in a scene. The one I’m writing this post on.
As one of my non-porn friends night said that evening, “Everyone wants to be a piece of Violet’s furniture.”
And to think that six years ago (Six? really? Tempus fugit!) we were having fun with the idea of a RealDoll orgy at Violet’s place. I still think it’s a shame that never happened. But I’m struck, as I read those old blog posts, by how much has changed in six short/long years.
Even if the RealDoll orgy had gone down as contemplated, it would have had a strong 20th century flavor about it: mechanical participants, corporate sponsorship, marketing angle, careful planning, strong focus on ten grand worth of lovingly-fetishized products. This “got a few emails from some friends and before I knew it an excellent porn shoot broke out in my bedroom” is, both socially and economically, much more 21st century. It’s Bruce Sterling’s White Fungus, “architecture of participation” stuff. Who needs a studio when you’ve got a cell phone and a sufficient network of cool friends? Or, turning it to better place the emphasis where it may belong, how do you make a porn movie when what you’ve got is, not a studio or a thriving business model that can front you the studio lease, but a cell phone and a network of cool friends? Growing up soon after Depression 1.0, my mom called this “making do with what you’ve got.” If she’d had a cell phone, she would have been dangerous.
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