Edit: I was just feeling glum because someone I respect wrote something I wish were true, which I do not believe is true. I don’t feel like I was able to fully express my thoughts on this.

Full disclosure: Bing is an advertiser on this site, yet BlueBlood.net does not on the first dozen pages of search results for a search on Blue Blood. SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO is internet professional lingo for the process by which someone expert in this area would attempt to fix Bing’s search results so they would no longer be defective in this regard.

I’ve been really bummed out all day because of something Derek Powazek wrote. (Also, I made the mistake of watching this week’s brilliant but melancholy Mad Men on TiVo to snap myself out of it. Doh.) Halcyon first turned me on to Derek Powazek’s writing. Derek Powazek tends to write useful articles about how to make good web sites. He has an engaging style and manages to speak clear tech talk. I think we shook hands once at an event, but we do not know each other; I’m just a fan.

Entertainment industry professionals always used to joke with me and Forrest Black about Blue Blood in print being the “trade mag of cool”, maybe because we always found the next big thing and provided contact info. I suppose I’d be wildly wealthy today if I’d just marketed myself as a consultant and charged quite a bit more for that data than the price of a magazine. My focus, however, was just on making a good magazine. One of the coolest things about making a magazine, versus making a website, is that I could just mail anyone I thought was cool a free one. I never felt like I needed fancy press releases. I could just show what I created to people I respected and hope they liked it. I didn’t know it until years too late for this to be useful to me, but Blue Blood was far and away the highest circulation magazine in its niche. So I guess that all worked just fine, in some respects. But, for a web site, this becomes a lot more challenging because previously normal human journalists may freak out that they are being spammed when sent a press release, as opposed to physical freebies.

Here is where Derek Powazek’s “Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists” article really depressed me. His advice is to never SEO (see the witty title there). His article states that SEO does not work and also, because it works temporarily, it clogs up search engine results. (I think he should pick which is the problem.) He directs his readers to avoid making sites for Google and just make good web sites for one’s readers and tell people you know personally about them.

So here is why the “Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists” article really upset me. The whole time I was growing up, it was drummed into me that I absolutely had to get good grades and go to good schools, so I could get a good job and a good life. Okay, both my parents went to Harvard and I went to Wesleyan, but Wes is still one of the top universities in the country on all ranking lists. And that paired with a hot suit will get me a job as a nonsexual escort. Escorting is actually the only job I’ve ever done which required me to have an advanced education. As writing about that job for Hustler’s Chic got me my first non-music glossy magazine clip, I supposed I’ve arguably gotten two jobs for all those years of school. Kind of a sucky ROI.

But I digress. The point is that I was told to just work hard and do what I was supposed to do and I would be rewarded. And I fucking well wasn’t. So it upsets me being told once again that I need to just work hard and do what I’m supposed to do and I will be rewarded. I mean, I still do that because it’s just how I am wired at this point. Like the characters on Mad Men, there is a thin patina of mild disappointment on a lot of my experiences, but I no longer get wildly, dramatically, heart-breakingly disappointed, because I stopped believing my reward was just around the corner and would be given just for making something good which people liked.

In point of fact, for example, I work very hard on making BlueBlood.com a good site. But I spend my time creating and publishing content the readers will enjoy, not optimizing for Google or Yahoo or Bing. BlueBlood.com never makes the front page of Google for a freaking search for Blue Blood. This makes doing radio and TV shows much less beneficial than it should be. That site has actually only received 844 visits from Google total this month. And 143 of those were people searching for specifically blueblood.com. I don’t get why someone would type that into a search engine, but the point is that just working hard and doing good work are absolutely not enough. I would love it if someone from Google could explain why the heck that site is never indexed properly. Thank goodness I have extensive traffic resources outside of what search engines provide. And I work hard on those too. It makes me viscerally angry to see Twitter lighting up with venture capital rich tech gurus saying everyone else should just work hard, tell their friends they’re working on cool stuff, and sit around waiting for something good to happen. The Underpants Gnomes on South Park have a waaaaay better business plan.

I like to do the right thing and I enjoy working hard. But I am well aware that I pay a heavy price for the luxury of doing what I feel is the right thing on the road less traveled. And I am sick to death of being advised to keep doing the same thing while expecting different results.

AltPorn.net interviewer Beda Hoydenish writes:

“Everyone knows Amelia G runs the Blue Blood empire and also does some of the photography and writing for it. Here on APN, we’ve featured photographs she has shot for Blue Blood many times and we’ve mentioned her writing once or twice. (You can also see the interview we did with Amelia G five years ago — Ed.) I write for APN and I have all the old Blue Blood print magazines from the 90’s in plastic bags with cardboard backing, so I thought I was pretty aware and I still found a lot on Amelia G’s new AmeliaG.com site to both inform and entertain me. In addition to running the business end of Blue Blood and working as an editor for many projects, Amelia G has had hundreds of photo sets published and thousands of articles. Amelia G has done writing and/or photography for all the major adult publishing houses including Playboy, Penthouse, Flynt, Crescent, Magna, and AVN, plus niche magazines including Marquis, On Our Backs, Skin Two, Tattoo Teasers, Fetish, Extreme Fetish, $pread, and of course Blue Blood. Her fiction has appeared in Best American Erotica, Best S/M Erotica, and Best Women’s Erotica and dozens more books. But she still took time out of her busy schedule to give APN this exclusive interview.

APN: Blue Blood magazine in print was really ground zero for jump-starting the whole altporn genre and you’ve managed to maintain a top ranking for Blue Blood for more than sixteen years. To what do you credit your remarkable success and longevity?

AG: Thanks. I always hope the universe will smile on me for hard work and doing the right thing, and sometimes it does. A big advantage Blue Blood had in coming to the web is that the magazine was always subscription-driven and we had free sites for the community for years before we launched our first membership site. We actually had paid members before we had even actually launched the first pay site because we tested out a banner rotation for a few minutes and people saw it. I really appreciate the support we’ve gotten over the years and try to really put a lot back into the scene and into having . . .

Cool promo pic of yours truly by Forrest Black. Read the whole interview by Beda Hoydenish on AltPorn.net.

I enjoyed LiveJournal because sometimes I have fragments of ideas which are not ready to be an official article, but it is nice to be able to start giving the words shape. I also felt like I could actually get to know people on there. Like, if I met someone at a rock show, we could exchange info and continue getting to know one another. I was extremely bugged, however, when I started seeing people out at night and I’d ask them how they were and be told to read their LJ. Why bother leaving the house if you refuse to have a conversation? Over time, people started taking LJ more and more seriously. This meant that, first of all, that, if I complained about work on there, some dick would take it as uber-personally and big deal as if I had sent out a press release and posted “I had a hard day because blah blah” to every high traffic site I operate. Secondly, there started to be too many people on my LJ list for me to keep up with what everyone was up to. Most disappointingly, treating LJ as a publishing platform rather than a diary meant that other people started writing less and less personal entries and more and more press release-like entries which had more to do with how they wish to be perceived than who they truly are.

At first, I hated MySpace because it seemed like a service whose only application was to allow other people access to my Rolodex without having to say “thanks for the introduction”. Then I also hated MySpace because it seemed to pull audience from LJ, which I had enjoyed the interactivity of, and MySpace didn’t really seem to have any way to get to know people. MySpace is like this menu of people who seem like, in another life, I might have really enjoyed knowing them, but MySpace gives just enough of a taste to feel weird about people, without really enough to know them at all. Partly, MySpace is so terribly public that one really ought to keep anything private off there, but this means that there are always aspects of a person left off there which would be important to know if you were truly meeting them. And, if you are forthcoming with someone who has a popular MySpace account, you can’t trust that they will know to keep private things private, libel laws or no. Who wants to spend all their time in legal battles? It is easier to just be really private and closed off. I hired people to handle my MySpace accounts for me because MySpace filled me with such a deep keening sense of loneliness. There are certain sorts of MySpace messages, I enjoy answering personally. (If you got a message with my name signed to it, I wrote it.) For the most part, though, every time I’ve thought a Los Angeles person I met on there seemed like someone I’d want to know, they ended up digitally booty-calling me. Part of me thinks I should be flattered by this, as I generally am motivated to converse with people who are accomplished, intelligent, talented, creative, famous, etc. But it just makes me ache inside. Do human beings no longer meet in person for anything besides sex?

Then, one of the years I spoke at SXSW, the big interactive launch of the season was Twitter. Everyone was all a-twitter over this new ADD version of LiveJournal. Instead of having to read long transcripts of arguments someone had with their mom or extensive deconstructions of the merits of macaroni with and without cheese, Twitter only leaves room for 140 characters in a post. If you have a Blackberry or an iPhone or similar cell phone, it is easy to update your Twitter even while driving in traffic. (Not that I recommend this, as I’m pretty sure it might be illegal or dangerous or something most places.) Because of the SXSW launch and general tech community culture driving the initial Twitter world, I had mostly people I knew from that part of my life on my read list and I felt like I actually was getting to know some interesting and accomplished people a bit better on there, seeing cool links as news broke, and generally getting to enjoy a new Web 2.0 property. I’m not sure if there was a panel at the recent adult trade shows in Vegas where everyone was told that Twitter is great for interacting with fans or getting traffic or what, but I’ve recently had a couple hundred new people add me to their Twitter follow lists. Although early on, I just had my assistant add back all new follows on Twitter and I’d just remove the boring or annoying ones later, I now prefer to check out each new follow personally. This means that now, when I think of posting what delicious things I am consuming for breakfast (iced soy latte and smoked salmon on low salt sprouted grain bread), I feel guilty like I should really get on checking out all those new accounts which have expressed interest by following my account. Only then I have to wonder how many followed my Twitter because they are interested in me and how many followed because they want me to be interested in them? And, of course, I recently got to discover that 140 characters is not too few for someone to start drama, but it is too few to explain one’s point diplomatically enough to get them to chill.

Although I was an early adopter on Twitter, I came to Facebook late. Partly it had trouble with my name and partly I had to get alumni email stuff set up for it to be useful in finding former classmates. Plus the places in Germany, Belgium, Israel, and Switzerland where I went to school in my teen years were not listed and the system seemed to be set up for fewer high schools. Facebook tech support is impressively by far the most responsible and effective of any of the social networking sites and I eventually did get an account properly set up there. On Facebook, I used a different rule of thumb for friending people or approved friend requests: I only wanted friends on there who I would deliberately have a meal or a tasty beverage with. If the person is someone I’d be pleased to get a dinner or drinks invite from or a person I’d be likely to extend a dinner or drinks invite to, then I’d approve them. If the person is just someone who would like me to take their photo or who would only be interested in dining with me if I brought important (to them) or fuckable (by them) people with me, then that would be a no. I find it unfortunate that my morbid college friends can’t shut up about my two friends from that time period who died tragically. If the deaths of those two people saddens my living friends half as much as me, I’d expect they would want to think about it a bit less often than daily. My Facebook friend add process is slow because when a new person adds me who I want to add back, I like to write a personal note to them and I do keep up with my friends status feeds and such. I update my own Facebook status with Twitter and import notes from my LiveJournal, so my Facebook friends probably get a mildly more complete view. But tonight, I logged onto Facebook thinking that maybe I would do something sociable and just felt a wave of social anxiety. Although there are five or six pending requests on there I was really really looking forward to approving and interacting with, there were also a hundred I was kind of stumped by. Lots of women I’ve known have naturally changed their names. Lots of people I’ve known by fannish names or punk rock nicknames and I don’t recall what their mamma called them, even if I knew once. Remembering multiple names for every person becomes really hard once one has met enough people. I recognized some of the add requests as people I’ve photographed but don’t know and some as people who dated friends of friends of friends or who were otherwise tangentially part of social groups I was in. Not people I dislike at all, but not all people I’d be inclined to hang with if I were in town for a weekend or vice-versa. Some people ring a bell and I agonize over where I know them from, but don’t want to offend by asking. My time is so limited that I’d really like to have just one social platform where everyone on my list is someone who might actually care if I had a death in the family. Or at least enjoy getting coffee with me on a good day.

Actually, although I still minimally participate in LiveJournal, MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook, I find that, for me, all the new Web 2.0 modes of interaction feel great for a few months and then feel kinda ache-inducing. If I’m so connected, why do I feel so disconnected? The only web interaction sites which tend to consistently be enjoyable for me are forums. This is why it is so important to me that the BlueBlod.net boards be a place where people from varied backgrounds can exchange different viewpoints in an intelligent and real way, without tonal BS bulletpoints, without flame wars, without being unable to back up what they say.

But, every once in a while, it just all fills me with such a deep keening sense of loneliness, I pine for the days when I used to just drop by friends’ houses and vice-versa, when it felt worth getting dressed up to go out, whether or not photos would be taken. I realize this is the internet age equivalent of longing for the times when people dressed up to go visit the town square. I remember my grandparents talking about country clubs taking the place of the town square or something along those lines that a child’s mind couldn’t quite grasp. A country club is too geographically local for today’s mobile world, though. I wish I could take a year off and just travel and write and eat right and visit people from different times in my life and different areas of my interests and see who I really connect or re-connect with and who is just a pleasant memory. The country club of Web 2.0 is just simultaneously overwhelming with the constant clamor of thousands of apparently potential friends and lonely with lack of anything real enough to feel . . . well, real.