SXSW is upon us once again. This reminds me that I meant to post the podcast of a panel Halcyon and I and this camgirl Seska did at SXSW. Halcyon is the king of coming up with humorous, lurid, and otherwise catchy panel titles. This means that, like me and like most web professionals, he has about a billion funny site domains. His main home on the web is currently CockyBastard, although Pinkgasm is listed in the SXSW credits. I’ll spare you all full bios, but SXSW edited my bio to say “Amelia G holds the titles of editor, writer, and photographer who founded Blue Blood” instead of just saying I’m an editor, writer, and photographer. My title on my business cards says chick-in-charge and writer and photographer are not titles. SXSW is a fun conference and they felt very strongly this particular year that it was vital that they refer to those things as titles, so I rolled with it and who knows what process they used for deciding how to specify site or company for each guest speaker.

At any rate, here is the MP3 podcast of our panel:

Pay Up! Should Publishers Choose the Porn Path?
Moderator: John Halcyon Halcyon Styn Digital Explorer, Pinkgasm
John Halcyon Styn Digital Explorer, Pinkgasm
Amelia G Chick in Charge, Blue Blood
Seska Lee Sajnet

As the public becomes more comfortable paying for premium content and services, what can we learn from the pornographic trailblazers? What billing models and payment systems are working online in porn that would successfully crossover to mainstream? What types of content and services can types of sites are ready for the Porn Path of Pay to Peruse? The panel will include veterans in the online adult industry discussing relevant trends and lessons learned.

My work with the SpookyCash B2B affiliate program, which allows people with high traffic sites to get paid for sending members to pay sites, is probably most relevant to what we discussed. So I gave away like a gajillion SpookyCash T-shirts to folks I chatted with after our panel. One of the people who came up after we spoke introduced herself as the ex of Kevin from the cover of Blue Blood #5 in print. This intro was a little nerve-wracking, but she turned out to be cool and Kevin assures me their relationship is amicable. What I make as a content producer is not porn, but the panel was really a discussion of the pay-for-content business model which primarily works for naughty membership sites.

The other big sex panel at SXSW that year was:

Sex and Computational Technology
Moderator: Amanda Williams, University of California at Irvine
Amanda Williams University of California at Irvine
Violet Blue Blogger, Open Source Sex
Johanna Brewer University of California at Irvine
Kyle Machulis Engineer, Nonpolynomial Labs
Cory Silverberg Author & Educator, Come As You Are & About.com

Computer technology has moved off the desktop and into homes, cars, pockets, and urban streets, in support of human relationships casual or intimate. Sex is an important facet of human experience, something that intertwines with intimacy, domesticity, mental health, play, and many other areas of our lives. Sex + tech is more than lots o’ internet porn. Let’s talk about teledildonics, virtuality, intimate interfaces, assistive technologies, and more.

The Sex and Computational panel was a lot of fun and it did not take long to figure out that the exuberant Kyla Machulis was qDot from SlashDong. SlashDong is a site I discovered via Molly Case’s SexyFandom which is all about pimping out electronics for orgasmic purposes. If you have ever wondered what would happen if you hooked a sex toy to pretty much any other device in existence, SlashDong probably has your answer, along with technical diagrams. For this SXSW panel, qDot brought a number of entertaining little devices and just lit up the room with his personality. To shine on a panel with so many big personalities on it takes some serious oomph. Hopefully, this comes through on an MP3 podcast the same as it did in person. After this panel, everyone from the various sex panels except for Halcyon who was MIA all went for dinner together, and we got to have a spirited debate about sex workers rights and exploitation and eat pretty tasty SouthWestern. I told Kyle Machulis how I had first come across his site and we talked about how SexyFandom had not updated in a while, but Molly Case said she’d be getting back to it real soon (hint, hint).

Austin has good SouthWestern cuisine and requires a lot of eating and drinking. UT Austin was my safety school and all I have to say is thank goodness I did not end up going there or I would have had liver failure before my sophomore year. Not that it would not have been an entertaining journey to liver failure.

You can check out a number of SXSW podcasts which are not sex-related on the podcast page of the SXSW site.

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.

If you want exposure for yourself or your projects or you are seeking expertise, then it matters how busy or influential a web property is. There are many third party tools to assist internet professionals in ascertaining a site’s true size, beyond its hype. As a site surfer, most people respond to how interesting the site is to them personally, taking into account aspects such as ease of use, subject matter, quality, wit, visual appeal, production values, and just how generally entertaining or informative a site strikes them as being. For getting the word out there and for believing what you read, it is important to consider the source, not just for agenda, but for overall accuracy and reach. The bigger a site’s audience, the more I feel it has a responsibility to present quality journalism.

When I hear a new idea, I like to familiarize myself with the source, so I can assess the extent to which I should integrate that new idea into my own worldview. Every time I’ve been a guest speaker at the SXSW festival, I’ve also attended a ton of other speakers’ interactive media panels because I love learning and part of the point of professional conventions is to become even more expert in one’s field. SXSW is fun for me, not only because a lot of friends of mine are there, but because it has exposed me to a lot of interesting new ideas and people.

When there was a panelist speaking or site mentioned I was unfamiliar with, I felt the itch of a phantom limb, wanting to check out the stats on sites he or she was presenting as examples. When I work online normally, I have an array of professional tools at my fingertips to research a source and assess how popular and influential a particular site is. A lot of people do SXSW with laptops or extremely web-enabled cell phones (I just have a regular Blackberry I am not a power-user of.) and look stuff up online constantly and this is probably one of the reasons why.

Now none of the dozens of tools for checking how popular a site is are perfect. Each one is helpful to a point and they tend to each weigh different factors. While none should be taken as gospel, utilizing multiple benchmarks tends to give an excellent ballpark metric for size of audience. Realistically, even if you had a login to a particular site’s stats, you still only get a ballpark idea because different log analyzers parse unique visits, raw visits, types of data viewed, and referrals differently. Back in 2006, Beeker the StatsNrrd, over at AltPorn.net started doing an Altporn ‘A’ List Alexa Rankings chart. Over time, as some sites went under and some were added to the chart, that list grew to twenty-some-odd sites. It is not precisely the list I would select in a Sesame Street game of “Which one of these things is not like the others?”, but it is a pretty good resource for comprehensive accurate measures of sites within the altporn genre. Sometimes I wish APN would count all of Blue Blood’s sites aggregated together because I feel that would better demonstrate Blue Blood’s market position, but the way APN does it is certainly reasonable. I wish a site like BrokenDollz were higher up in the rankings because I like chatting with webmaster Judas, but the numbers just are what they are.

As a longtime reader of the Fleshbot sex blog, I know that, like me, Fleshbot is familiar with the AltPorn.net list because they have referenced it. So I was surprised when new Fleshbot editor, and former That Strange Girl webmaster, Lux Alptraum picked up the most bizarre toplist of altporn sites by someone named Sean Adamz whose site ranks . . . well, the numbers just are what they are and the site Fleshbot pulled the list from ranks low. Honestly, I was surprised that anyone at Fleshbot would use such a poor source, but I was shocked that Lux Alptraum would. Although I understand Lux Alptraum’s major at Columbia was urban studies, Columbia does boast one of the finest journalism schools in the world. So Lux must know better than to source information that way and she either, having recently started a new gig, didn’t realize how seriously people take Fleshbot, thought everyone would read the fine print and just view it as humorous, or, as some disenchanted Fleshbot readers commented on this article, maybe she was having an off day. Perhaps she was busy packing for her trip to Vegas and just had a word count she had to meet; Fleshbot’s increasing focus on quantity over quality may be reducing . . . quality and accuracy.

The term altporn didn’t come about until 2001, nine years after Blue Blood launched. I believe the expression was coined by SuicideGirls CEO Sean Suhl and some porn video director, who had shot for SG and for Killshot’s EroticBPM, or perhaps an unheralded PR rep of theirs came up with the altporn term. I prefer the term counterculture erotica to altporn because I founded Blue Blood in print in 1992 and I feel the cohesive lifestyle aspect is larger than the sex aspect. (What I like is erotica; what the other guy likes is porn.)

So I hesitate to call anything I do altporn, but, if everything were still on dead trees and a magazine distributor asked me what publications to shelve Blue Blood with, I would be familiar enough with the marketplace to know the answer is to rack Blue Blood with SuicideGirls, EroticBPM, GodsGirls, DeviantNation, and Burning Angel. A funny thing about web browsing vs. bookstore or newsstand browsing is that, although a journalist writing on the topic of altporn should be aware of all these web properties to be credible, many BlueBlood.net readers may have never heard of any of those sites.

I am not classifying these sites necessarily as a recommendation but as simple basic understanding of genre. From an artistic or punk or feminist activism standpoint, I feel Blue Blood is the polar opposite of some of these sites. There are a few sites by individual photographers I might like more and prefer to recommend, but a photographer site is simply a different niche, in the same way a photo book would be shelved in a different part of the bookstore, and, like it or not, this is what the same shelf holds from a marketing standpoint. A Blue Blood print reader would have most likely also been familiar with On Our Backs, Skin Two, O, Tattoo Savage, Taste of Latex, Future Sex, Propaganda, Ghastly, and the various other demographically similar mags, such as boing-boing or Axcess, likely to be shelved next to Blue Blood. The structure of print caused related products to be viewable together.

If there were not enough magazines in a genre, then there was no rackspace for them, so it was desirable not to be the only one. If an adult newsstand or liquor store didn’t really stock alternative press, then Blue Blood got shelved with the Hustler publications, Swank, Club, Penthouse, Playboy, and suchlike. But it sold through best in locations where the other magazines had more in common. Fast forward to the online world and there seems to be a bit of a Highlander mentality where many people who run sites seem to believe there can only be one site of any particular sort. Because of the way web media is structured differently from printed media, it is actually possible for someone who loves one “altporn” site to be utterly unfamiliar with another. Coming from a magazine background myself, I have a decidedly inclusive and non-destructive bias in my approach to the marketplace.

Some of the impetus for this feature article on web traffic rankings in altporn stemmed from what should have been a really minor interaction Forrest Black had on Twitter. Having been involved with Blue Blood from the beginning and actively involved since the third print issue, Forrest Black is familiar with the reasons for being aware of genre. Feel free to call Forrest Black Blue Blood’s CTO or Art Director, but he is in charge of the look and feel of all Blue Blood sites, and he sometimes plays on Twitter when he doesn’t feel like working on all that. So, because someone named Sean Adamz had friended Forrest on Twitter, Forrest noticed the initial flawed toplist authored by this Sean guy and immediately pointed out that he had only included one of the Blue Blood sites and had entirely left off GodsGirls, DeviantNation, and EroticBPM. Sean replied that he counted Blue Blood as a network (even though he had only listed the stats for GothicSluts), continued to leave serious players GodsGirls, DeviantNation, and EroticBPM off his list, got surreally aggro, and then messaged Forrest asking for instructions on how to do the stats on aggregating a network. Apparently Forrest had been generous with answering questions from this guy in the past, but I really don’t think someone should put together a purportedly definitive list if they just don’t have the skills or expertise to do so.

Speaking of Twitter, one of the people I first became acquainted with at SXSW is Weblogs entrepreneur Jason Calacanis who has pretty much the most entertaining Twitter on the site. Now I don’t need to see the specific benchmarks to have an idea that any project Jason Calacanis is involved in is probably influential. He is best known for selling the blog network he co-founded to AOL for $30 million. But, lest anyone think that the world of “altporn” is somehow more bitchy or petty than other areas of internet business, some of his recent Tweets regarding quantifying site popularity read:

“techcrunch please stop using Comscores bulls$%^t numbers. Quantcast Quantified numbers speak–everything else is sample based garbage. can people please stop quoting comScore’s b.s. numbers–they are garbage. Quantcast’s quantified program is the only accurate one out there. Alexa, Comscore, and Compete are sample based,gamed & totally inaccurate–do NOT use them please. put Quantcast on your site or zip it! :-) also,why doesn’t google analytics let you publish/certify some of your stats like Quantcast does? that would put an end to comscore nonsense.”

Full disclosure: I do not feel I am biased by Jason Calacanis having plied me (and a lot of people) with beer and pizza. I think all of this would be a lot more fun if everyone got together more often for beer and pizza. Or water and sushi for the carb-conscious. Or just more things which are IRL and friendly or at least professionally cordial. People get all spun out and just plain wrong on the internet 24/7. Then again, I could be at the adult industry trade shows in Las Vegas right now, but I decided that the ROI, on $9,000 worth of beer for the press coverage and affiliate marketing teams and business associates, wasn’t really good enough.

At any rate, the initial Sean Adamz posting nonsense to Twitter would have just been a situation where one expresses an informed opinion, has a 140 character conversation, and/or removes a troublemaker from the Twitter read list and forgets about it, except high traffic website Fleshbot reprinted the flawed list as Your Definitive Guide To The Web’s Top Ten Altporn Sites. The source list was so poorly-researched that it failed, even from a data entry perspective, transposing digits on the SuicideGirls ranking to make SG appear to be a few hundred slots less popular than it is. Now Fleshbot’s Lux Alptraum was quick to point out that she thought this was in no way a definitive list and, unlike the original author of this inaccurate list who had no words or explanation with his chart, Lux, being an actual writer, wrote something about each site and included sample pictures she selected from each one. (One slightly off-topic note on this is that (a) there is no period after the G in my name and (b) although Forrest Black and I did shoot the particular image selected, Blue Blood has published dozens of awesome photographers and I wouldn’t want anyone to think Forrest Black or I were trying to take credit for all photos Blue Blood ever put out, when Blue Blood has published practically a who’s who of such work, including Chad Michael Ward, Kelly Lind, Lori Mann, Christine Kessler, Justice Howard, Gunter Blum, Ashley Fontenot, Jim Hancock, Carlos Batts, Roman Sluka, Richard Kadrey, and many many more.)

I asked the folks who were left out for their thoughts on the matter, as well as the folks at AltPorn.net. APN could not be reached for comment, possibly because they are all getting drunk doing business at the aforementioned adult industry trade shows in Las Vegas this week. Scott Owens aka Killshot of EroticBPM was somewhere between resigned and sanguine, saying:

“It’s no big deal. I see it kinda like how kids these days try to make lists of all time greatest bands but don’t include anything before 1990. Ebpm is just like the classic rock of alt porn”

Chad Grant of DeviantNation hadn’t seen the article yet and thus had perhaps a bit more of a visceral gut reaction, as he initially said some rather unprintable things but expressed a desire to avoid “drama” with the potentially unbalanced. I would generally agree with him, but I had dismissed the original Sean Adamz altporn toplist as not worth a lot of attention and then it got picked up by Fleshbot which, according to web traffic benchmarks mentioned here, appears to have a lot of readers. I’m a big believer in education and sometimes I feel it is important to bring accuracy. DeviantNation’s Chad Grant made the important point that the concept of alternative is going to mean different things to different people, saying:

“i dont really see those other sites even remotely relevant because they’re so late to the party and non existant in terms of an actual site (community, members and content) . . . we all have very different interests though, we’re in a very wide group of “alt porn” but that means different things to everyone . . . DN obviously conveys what we think “alternative” should stand for, but that doesnt mean we are better than anyone else that wants to have their interpretation of it. its a very all encompassing word . . . The author it is attributed too Lux … that’s the old owner of “That Strange Girl” that claimed her alt site never made [it] for every reason under the sun except her or it’s own shortcomings”

In initial response to the Fleshbot piece, annaliese nielsen of GodsGirls had feelings largely similar to my own, telling me:

“i did see the article and i think it was pretty irresponsible of fleshbot to post that piece. i know that godsgirls is still the new kid on the block in the eyes of many long time producers such as yourself and maybe i am being a conspiracy theorist but i felt that that list was nothing but an attempt by sean to make himself look far more relevant than he is and to make us look irrelevant. i saw that the editor wrote that the title was intended as comedy and if that is truly the case i don’t think that was clear at all. as a long time fleshbot reader who often links to their articles i feel a little bit insulted that sean’s piece was published there, to be frank.”

As I actually do have the skills to aggregate traffic data to ballpark a network, I’m going to share the actual rankings with you all here. Keep in mind that these are rankings which are current this week but likely to change if you are reading this article in 2010. The web is always shifting traffic patterns. An “altporn” entity generally consists of a number of component parts, including a members area with photos and sometimes video and sometimes erotic writing. There is also a community, a news section of some sort, a way for models and possibly other contributors to apply, one or more tours, an affiliate program for professional webmasters to use to get paid for linking, and sometimes a merch shop. It is possible for all these components to be on one domain or spread out across many domains. For example, GodsGirls might put their model application on their primary domain, while Blue Blood has it on BlueBloodPhoto.com. Burning Angel might put their community and entertainment news on the same domain with their primary adult content, while Blue Blood splits the non-nude news and community aspects off to BlueBlood.net and keeps the NSFW stuff on other domains. GodsGirls keeps all their video on their primary domain, while BurningAngel breaks it out onto multiple domains. Although Blue Blood and EroticBPM both run solo girl sites distinct from the primary membership areas, I did not include those in the overall stats for Blue Blood or EroticBPM, but I did count the Joanna Angel solo girl site in benchmarking the BurningAngel network because I feel like that is more integral to their branding. Because it would not be possible to isolate just the relevant data, I did not count billing processors such as CCBill or MerchLackey in these stats. I also did not count personal portfolios or sites such as SpookyLinks (produced by Blue Blood) or MakeOutClub (produced by 3Jane) which may have some of the same ownership as what is being benchmarked, but are really distinct web properties.

According to Alexa Reach rankings, the serious players in this currently rank as follows:

1. SuicideGirls .00913%
2. Blue Blood Network .006866%
3. BurningAngel Network .005989%
4. GodsGirls .00203%
5. DeviantNation .00066%
6. EroticBPM Network .00062%

Alexa Reach numbers are an extrapolated percentage of all global web traffic, sampled from a combination of ISP data and toolbar users who have visited a site during an average day. To give you a couple of comparatives, according to Alexa, MySpace gets 5.717% of global internet users in an average day. Google receives 28.092%. Or to put it another way, Lux, who had a certain journalistic responsibility writing for a site with a reach of .0198%, sourced the egregiously misleading list she posted from a site with a reach of .0003%.

Another measure I like to use of a site’s importance is how many other sites link in to it, according to an aggregation of data from most popular search engines. I prefer to combine data from all major SERPS, but Yahoo appears to be in crazy flux today, and I don’t want to drown you all in numbers, so I’m only going to attempt Google which is not currently dancing and counts links the same with or without the www. This ranking is an example of how quickly the web changes. Last time I ran these numbers the Blue Blood network was solidly in the #1 position and by today, January 9, 2009, when I am running these numbers, it has slid down to the #3 slot. Here are the current rankings by this measure for Google:

1. SuicideGirls 2,220
2. BurningAngel Network 713 (Good job, Alex Chechs!)
3. Blue Blood Network 620
4. GodsGirls 406
5. EBPM Network 88
6. DeviantNation 42

Blue Blood’s server stats show no major difference. If anything, traffic is up, but that doesn’t matter because this is just an example of how third parties can benchmark website traffic. Blue Blood could stay exactly the same for number of visitors and links in and another related site could go up and that would change the rankings. That seems obvious to me, but I felt it needed to be spelled out if anyone could attempt to make a definitive list which left off kind of more than half the major players. A more comprehensive list than this is possible and AltPorn.net has done many of them, but this is a list of the top of the field in terms of traffic. I do not feel that anyone else’s success diminishes my own, so feel free to point out if you think there are any serious players I forgot. I want to stress that I am using standard industry tools to measure who the players are and I am not leaving anyone out here.

Aside from truth and accuracy, why is it important how many visitors a web property gets? I know that, whenever someone wants to publish my writing or photography, unless it is a heck of a paycheck, it is more important to me, as an artist, to know that my work will be seen. Even for mainstream models, modeling is very much about exposure, about the joy of being fabulous in front of the right people, about being remembered in great photos. For anyone who cares about either exposure for something they do, or responses from the most basic acknowledgement to of course real fame online or IRL, it really does matter how many people are looking. Sending a book or CD for review to a site with three visitors a month isn’t going to be very helpful to an author or a band, but a positive write-up from a site with three million readers can make a real difference. Modeling for a site with a lot of eyes on it can lead to magazine covers, television appearances, dating rock stars, and various other enjoyable activities, desired by people with mohawks, tattoos, multi-colored hair, and unusual modes of dress. Experience points and paychecks count too, but a well-informed creative person also wants to know who is watching and how many people are watching.

To recap, it is grossly inaccurate to leave certain sites off any definitive list of web properties in the goth, punk, altporn, counterculture erotica or whatever-you-want-to-call-it genre. If such a chart in 2009 does not include most of the Blue Blood network and does not include EroticBPM, GodsGirls, or DeviantNation at all, it is simply a defective chart and one has to wonder about either the expertise or the agenda of whoever created it. Even if calling a defective list definitive in the title is intended to be facetious, it is irresponsible for a high traffic site not to perform due diligence on the facts it presents. It would also behoove anyone attempting to start a site to learn to crunch these sorts of numbers. It would be a plus if those, with no idea how to quantify site data, did not mislead audiences by putting out toplists, before learning how to do so. Numbers are not a matter of opinion.

I attended the Fictional Bloggers panel at SXSW. The panel featured Liz Henry and Odin Soli. They are both active in Latin American political writing, which is an area I admit I don’t follow. I spent some time in Brazil when my mother was stationed there and got some creepy awful illness which caused blood to exit from strange places and caused me to take medication which made everything taste like metal for a month. Also, despite huge natural resources and local wealth, there were homeless children there and that kinda freaked me out. I haven’t followed much in the way of anything Latin American since. Even though I live an easy drive from Tijuana, the only people who generally try to get me to go south of the border with them tend to be professional adult webmasters. These are the sort of guys who just can’t help bribing public officials and finding out where the donkey show is. As a result, despite having lived all over the world and living in Los Angeles now, I have never even visited Mexico for an hour.

Liz Henry’s work these days is working for Socialtext, which is a company attempting the interesting enterprise of introducing wiki technology to the corporate environment. She also blogs for Feminist SF which lists yours truly in their index of female authors of science fiction, so they have to be awesome. Bonus points: Liz Henry wears purple hair well. Odin Soli works for a company called Aveso, which is either a webhost, or more likely a company striving to sell big business on the cyberpunk giftcard accessory of teensy weensy electronic displays. I know it doesn’t seem like this is a more likely thing to even exist, but the Interactive portion of SXSW is about new tech and next time someone mails me a Starbucks giftcard as their holiday thanks for helping them have a good year, I’d like that card to have an animation of ice cubes in a latte. Actually, I’d like to claim ironic detachment on that one, but I really do think miniature electronic displays on cards would be pretty spiffy.

However, what Odin Soli is best known for is creating a fictional blog. And that was the main topic of the panel. From 2001 through 2004, he wrote an online diary of the supposed life of a young woman named Layne Johnson or Plain Layne. Odin Soli explains his concept of the character of Layne on his site saying, “Layne Johnson was an unlikely protagonist for that kind of fame. She was cute but gap-toothed, a twentynothing infowaif laboring in the lower GI tract of Corporate America. She struggled with her conservative Lutheran family and a revolving door of boyfriends — and later, girlfriends. She described herself as “un-out-dorkable” and tended to finish sentences with “hey?” And most of all, she shared her innermost thoughts and feelings with brutal honesty.” He thought it would be an interesting creative exercise, writing in the first person, with a female voice, in a medium like the internet where the readers could interact with the fictional character of Layne. He had previously written a travelogue in this style from 2000 to 2001, but, The Sex Pistols are Alive and Well and Living in Sohatsenango, the travel diary of the fictional female journalist Acanit became ethically uncomfortable for him after the events of 9/11. So he created Layne. Usually, an author would be very pleased if something he or she wrote garnered hundreds of thousands of fans. Unfortunately for Odin, his fans kinda thought Plain Layne was a real person and they cared about her like they would a real person. And, when he grew weary of the creative exercise, his creation’s fans clamoured for more. And, when he actually stopped writing Layne’s story, “her” readers turned sleuth, did some detective work, and outed the real author as being a man. The mainstream press went beserk and Odin had a pretty unpleasant time of it.

Liz Henry, whose BlogHer blog identifies her as “feminist, geek, punk, poet, mom”, made the point that, in situations where fictional journals are being put out there, the “dominant culture can be speaking for people who actually know much more about what it is like to be them.” She also pointed out to Odin Soli that all testimony is undermined if you undermine the social trust. His view was that, if the writing could potentially impact international public policy, then that was ethically dicey, but, even after all he had been through, he seemed to still feel that there ought to be a way to be entertaining with a fictional blog.

I admit I’ve played both LARPs and table top games with the best of them. But, in those situations, everyone knows you are not really a 10th level illustionist/assassin of half-orc descent. To write good fiction, a writer absolutely must be able to express voices besides his or her own. When I had one of my fiction pieces in Susie Bright’s Best American Erotica, I participated in a reading for it at Slim’s in San Francisco. I never do readings because, although I enjoy public speaking, actually reading my work aloud makes me experience agonizing shyness, but, hey, it was Susie Bright asking and she’s a real inspiration. At any rate, the story I had written was from a first person male point of view. I wrote it under my own name and Amelia sure ain’t a boy’s name. There was no question that the story was intended to be taken as fiction. Yet, some people who reviewed the show said that they found it sort of odd to see me up there in my red sequin corset talking about my cock and not meaning a strap-on. But it only struck them as humorously off-kilter, not actually enraging. Because they honestly did know, in a general way, what was real and what was not. Then again, they certainly couldn’t know which characters in my short story were based on which real life people and which parts were wholly fiction and which ones less so.

So how far is too far when it comes to online roleplay? Lots of writers use pseudonyms. Is that wrong? Does it become wrong when they use more than one? Does it become wrong when the illusion is broken? Does it become wrong if they have an actor perform the role of being their pseudonym on book tours the way J.T. Elroy did? One of the reasons so many people felt J.T. Elroy was more a hoax than a pseudonym was because they felt they were having a relationship with a real person, but their friend turned out not to really exist. Another reason people felt J.T. Elroy was so wrong was perhaps because the hoax was so very successful. Is it wrong for someone to pretend in their online profile that they are someone they are not? Is it more wrong if they pretend successfully enough to get laid IRL?

When does fiction bridge the gap and intrude too far into real life?

The sex blogger panel at SXSW was entertaining and provided food for thought, but I’ve been having trouble writing about it. I finally realized that the problem with writing about sex bloggers is the same problem bloggers have writing about sex: Specifically, sex and sexuality are very core to self, so even the most gentle critiquing of someone’s sexuality can be terribly hurtful. If any sex bloggers are wounded by what I say here, I apologize, but please keep in mind how you feel when you write about sex with a date who doesn’t like your review.

I attended the Do You Blog on the First Date? panel because Rachel Kramer Bussel was on it. With credits including Penthouse, Bust, and Punk Planet, I think of her more as a writer writer than as exactly a blogger, but she does blog very diligently about both her life and cupcakes, so she absolutely has blogging cred. Yes, I said she writes about “cupcakes” and that is not slang for some depraved sex act you are unfamiliar with. Sometimes a cupcake is just a cupcake and I can’t help loving quality food porn; it is hardwired into my system. And apparently I know now that I am not alone in my longings. Rachel Kramer Bussel’s writing is intelligent and raw. She manages to be very self-aware without injecting pounds of that fakey emo I-don’t-really-mean-it irony. No mean feat and a breath of fresh delight in the current online writing landscape. Especially in the blogosphere.

So I showed up to hear Rachel speak and found out about the other sex bloggers on the panel along the way. The moderator was Mikki Halpin who was a good SXSW selection because of her tome The Geek Handbook: User Guide and Documentation for the Geek in Your Life, although she is also a contributing editor to Glamour and known for her It’s Your World–If You Don’t Like It, Change It book of advice to teens on how to engage politically. Unless there is more than one Mikki Halpin writing from New York City, in which case I feel less informed, but that doesn’t seem super likely. She once was on People’s Court because someone’s mom sued her for putting their picture in her zine. She says Judge Wopner threw it out because the woman was bringing son on national TV, only she didn’t mention what the nature of the photograph was.

Then there was Melanie Boyer who does a dating blog called About Last Night for the Alt Weekly from my old stomping grounds, the Washington City Paper. She has great hair and big jangley earrings and lists a nice writerly assortment of life credits ranging from a Masters in International Training and Education to being a Peace Corps volunteer. She was kind enough to give me a turquoise pair of her signature boy short panties featuring her bird logo on the front and the line “a little birdie told me, About Last Night, dispatches from the morning after” inside.

Next up was Emily Listfield who does the Sex and the Single Mom blog for Redbook of all places. For some reason, I was surprised to see that Redbook was technologically ahead of the curve in the magazinosphere. I found Redbook also annoyingly on top of their pop up advertising technology and keep in mind what far reaches of the web I, uhm, surf. Emily Listfield is best known for her novels which genre-wise fall somewhere between chick lit and noir and I definitely intend to check them out.

I’m less surprised to find out that Glamour has a dating blogger Alyssa Shelasky. After all, Glamour and Wired share a corporate parent. Prior to blogging about her dates for Glamour, Alyssa Shelasky was a staffer for Us Weekly and before that apparently was so impressive a PR pitchwoman that journalists not only wrote about the products she repped, but also wrote about how awesome she was at getting them to do so.

Now you all know the cast of characters, so what are the ethics of blogging about dating? Melanie Boyer, of The Washington City Paper, said she initially thought she would get permission from each of her beaus. She says she believes men think they know the score when they don’t. So now her rule is to tell them what she does immediately and then the gloves are off once she is not seeing them any more, although she never uses names and attempts to be minimal enough on details that her guys are not easily identified. Still, she has more or less accidentally busted out at least two cheating lovers with her blog. Alyssa Shelasky, of Glamour, says that she tries not to humiliate people and to be friendly, nice, ethical, and kind, but sometimes she finds herself saying, “I would have thought you’d be flattered by that and instead they hate your guts and they’re going to therapy.” Rachel Kramer Bussel, of Penthouse Variations, agrees that people tend to “freak about little things.”

In addition to the ethics involved with the responses lovers and potential lovers may have to being blogged about, there are possible repercussions for third parties and other people’s opinions can come into play. Alyssa Shelasky worries about her parents’ response, so she won’t write about more than kissing. She initially thought her readers would be impressed if she talked about partying with Paris Hilton, but she quickly understood that they wanted to see her vulnerable, emotional, human side. Then again, she says she pretty much quits her job whenever she gets hate mail, so being her editor is probably kind of hellish. Emily Listfield’s blog is precisely about being sexual and being a single mom, but Redbook readers apparently can get a bit perturbed about her having sex at all. She understandably feels that her thirteen-year-old daughter shouldn’t know about her mother’s love life and has her friends lie such that “it gets very complicated to have that many realities out there.” She jokes that when your offspring turns thirty is the appropriate age to tell your child you blog about sex. Rachel Kramer Bussel has the luxury of blogging more for herself and thus having more control and says she will remove comments which are just mean and not constructive. She explains that “people really personalize whatever you write about and then they get affronted” and feel like they have to defend themselves.

The combination of invading the privacy of a writer’s romantic partners and having to stand behind whatever is blogged in the moment can be painful. Pretty much everyone on the the Should You Blog on the First Date? panel said they either wish they had blogged anonymously or were considering blogging anonymously. Emily Listfield feels that the anonymity of the women who comment on her blog entries gives them the freedom to really share about themselves and she feels that is a wonderful thing. Having her own name on her words makes Emily Listfield feel that her blog may be “destroying her life.” Alyssa Shelasky explains that Glamour wanted a face for the blog, someone who could promote on television and so forth, so being anonymous was not an option. She did enjoy it, however, when she got a MySpace account, despite feeling like, at twenty-nine, she was too old for it, and was surprised by the really really personal messages she received privately from readers. She felt like it was almost a group therapy evolution which made her like her blog more. Melanie Boyer says that the paper wanted journalistic integrity, so she had to use her name. Although she got a thrill from the whole “there’s that fat nerdy girl from junior high and now she’s a sex columnist” thing, she has found having her name on her blog inconvenient. In almost the same breath that Melanie Boyer makes the very astute observation that “anonymity erases integrity,” she expresses her own longing for anonymity. She doesn’t say whether she thinks her integrity would stay strong in such a situation. Rachel Kramer Bussel has considered doing an anonymous sex blog because she made the interesting observation that her friends who blog more anonymously than she does can be much more detailed without the same fear of upsetting those they blog about. It “makes you reconsider what you say when your name is on it,” she explains.

Pretty much all the sex bloggers agree that the people they blog about tend to be bummed about it and that they don’t much care for being blogged about themselves. Rachel Kramer Bussell says it felt weird to be blogged about by a peer, a woman she was in the same anthology with. Alyssa Shelasky says she hated having one of her guys, BostonBoy, stating his perspective in her comments and she also hated Gawker slagging her. Then again, she says she did get called “dating whore of Conde Nast” which might be a little brutal. Although I couldn’t find that exact phrase on the Gawker.com site, I did find a place where they had re-posted Alyssa Shelasky’s engagement announcement from a relationship which obviously didn’t work out. Ouch. In fact, she says, the only guy in six months who she dates who loved the Alyssacentric blog was on drugs, a “raging cokehead,” and she also had no trouble with a semi-homeless guy she had a three week fling with. Because he had no computer.

At this point in the panel, I apparently passed Forrest Black, who was shooting the presentation, a note which read: “MY BROTHER SHOULD MARRY SHELASKY ONLY HER FACE IS NOT HEART-SHAPED.” (For the non-Luddite savvy, note passing is a sort of low tech Twitter.) My brother is not a homeless coke addict with no computer (and I love my brother) so I guess there is just something wrong with me. I just thought she was awesome, really adept at coming across sweet, but in a way where you could tell she could handle high pressure socializing. I made sure to get her cell number and email, but, alas, reading her blog upon my return from Austin, I discovered that she is already in a relationship. Drat.

Emily Listfield says that “strategy-wise” doing a date blog is very hard because some guys say they won’t read it, but she wonders if they can really avoid that. The panelists all agreed that dating involves a certain amount of deciding what to reveal when and blogging about it messes up the timing on revealing oneself bit by bit. Rachel Kramer Bussel says she finds it problematic that sometimes she is fine with blogging about really personal stuff which is at a deeper level that how well she knows someone she is dating. To be a good blogger, she feels it is very important to “go beyond the surface” and she points out that her favorite blogs to read are not necessarily written by people she would want to be faced with in person.

Melanie Boyer says “ I write every day and it has become like exhaling; it has become my way of processing things,” only reading her entries makes me want to shake her, tell her how good she looks, and give her a mirror where she doesn’t see her junior high face. But she is a little oblivious and apparently still cranky at men for slights which must be far in her past now. Once they opened it up to questions, all of the panelists, except Rachel Kramer Bussel, made some fairly sexist remarks about men and male insight. Most of them seemed to be agreeing on the preposterous claim that men don’t blog about dating, and certainly straight men don’t, until Rachel Kramer Bussel brought up Tucker Max. Perhaps realizing how they sounded, Melanie Boyer made an attempt at a partial save by pointing out that the members of the sex blogger panel all have the perspectives of totally heterosexual women. Except, just from data presented during this specific panel, this is patently not the case. Rachel Kramer Bussel says that “it’s really hard not to internalize stereotypes about sex writing” and that some people look at writing about sex as frivolous, but she disagrees. Alyssa Shelasky says “you have to own it to feel good about it, like anything else,” only one gets the impression that she isn’t planning on being a dating blogger for much longer.

So should you blog on the first date? Going by the experiences of this panel of bright female writers, I’d have to say you probably should not. The question is posed: Does a great writer have to not care what anyone thinks? Going by my own experiences, I’d have to say that is probably true. Ouch. Are all great artists destined to die alone? I guess that is a topic for another article.

BlueBlood.com hottie Halcyon’s Cocky Bastard Vision from the Pink Broadcasting Company did two entertaining videos on the 2007 SXSW experience. Halcyon has been going to SXSW basically forever, has MC’ed more of the SXSW Web Awards than he hasn’t, and introduced me to the Interactive portion of the show when we did our “Turning Pink Into Green” panel back in 2005. We got to work and play together again at this year’s event and he is always a pleasure.

In the first interview video, Halcyon says his goal was to ask “a bunch of web visionaries what they loved most about the web.” My favorite answers were from web book author Derek Powazek who enthused about the internet’s ability to connect all different sorts of freaks and of course Forrest Black’s answer about how much he loves the creative exchange where he gets to directly connect with people when he makes media. Stay tuned after the credits for a little fellatio joke with yours truly. Halcyon’s pink microphone was just so darn alluring. He cut the part where I said something smart because (a) it was sorta similar to Forrest’s sentiments and (b) let’s face it, blowjobs are always more interesting than most other things.

After watching Halcyon’s slightly downbeat most recent video about his experience of the SXSW show this year, I feel kinda bad for not being a sketchy and lazy crack addict. In all seriousness, it is sort of odd for any internet professional to go into a high tech environment where a lot of people just take things like venture capital for granted. I would absolutely accept VC if I had a project which (a) would really benefit from it and (b) which I was really sure would benefit the angels investing in it. But one of the other things I love about the internet is the freedom it can offer the individual. I don’t really have to answer to much of anyone and that warms my punk heart. At any rate, both videos are funny and I am absolutely certain that Halcyon is going to do just fine.

I perused TuckerMax.com upon my return from Austin, to see if there was any vital news I should include in my article about Tucker Max and his writing and his SXSW panel. There was nothing which really jumped out as necessary for an introduction piece. But, what the heck, I’ll give you all the lowdown on what he has coming up.

He is currently working on a series for Comedy Central. He envisions the show as being a 100% scripted half hour comedy with no laugh track. Something like The Office or Entourage or Tucker suggests one “picture a Sex and the City for guys, done in the vein of my stories.” I’ve never seen Sex and the City, so this doesn’t evoke much for me, but maybe it will for other folks. At any rate, a fictional comedy half hour with the feel of a Tucker Max adventure sounds entertaining to me, so I’ll be putting the key phrase “Tucker Max” in my TiVo for whenever the heck the long-ass cycle of television production produces an actual show. I just used the word heck twice in the same article. Don’t get me wrong, I like the word heck, but I think this means I am jet-lagged.

A fun factoid is that apparently one of the producers of the upcoming Tucker Max show is former ABC president Jamie Tarses, the first female entertainment chief in the industry, who is reportedly the inspiration for the character of fictional sensitive-but-tough network president Jordan McDeere on the Aaron Sorkin-written, Thomas Schlamme-directed, star-studded, and shockingly disapppointing NBC show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

The Tucker blog announces his SXSW appearance and mentions that the show might be a bit pricey just to hear him speak, but caveats: “If you are a hot girl in or around Austin, well, you don’t need to pay to hear me speak. Just send me an email and we’ll get drinks. Or just we can just skip the pleasantries and you can come over to my hotel and fuck, whichever you prefer.”

The most recent entry in Tucker Max’s blog announces that he is going to be co-writing a book with Paul Wall. I told Forrest Black this and his first response was to ask if it was going to be called Stuff in Your Mouth. He then immediately posted this thought to his Twitter account. Twitter, although you can use it in your browser or instant messenger client, is essentially like short attention span LiveJournal for your Blackberry or Treo, and it was this year’s hot site to, err, twitter about at the 2007 SXSW Interactive conference. If you are feeling digitally trendy, you can find my Twitter account at http://twitter.com/AmeliaG and the still kinda undeveloped Blue Blood Twitter account at http://twitter.com/BlueBlood. Ya know, I just popped over to Twitter, preparatory to making this post and the two most recent posts were Forrest saying “Coffee is a good thing” and Halcyon saying, “trying to find a balance between SXSW inspiration and despair.” There may be a certain sort of odd haiku quality to Twitter.

I would like to say that I was aware of Tucker Max long before he was ever in print. On account of how I’m such a spectacularly plugged-in girl on the interwebs. The truth is that there are massively high traffic sites which somehow never have audiences intersect. In actuality, I was stuck in the Phoenix airport when visiting my family and, strangely enough, the Phoenix airport actually has a pretty good Borders. Which even more strangely contained a book with a sleek black cover featuring a gentleman with an antisocial smirk holding, I believe, a bottle and a bottle blonde with her visage replaced with a Your Face Here sign. The title was the clever I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. I bought it along with a stack of noir novels.

Tucker Max’s I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell chronicles the author’s drunken and salacious exploits. He came of age as the offspring of a South Beach restauranteur. From his writing, I gather his taste thus unsurprisingly runs to big-titted blondes with fit but not skinny bodies. Mildly Southern demeanor potentially a plus. Too bad for him that his intelligence level is off-the-scale brilliant. Tucker Max has raised hitting on drunk human sluts to the art form, or perhaps sport, of a more advanced species.

He comes across to some reviewers as a misogynist. He does tend to refer to women as filthy whores and mention that they owe him a rib. The following excerpt from a tale of a horseracing tailgate party drinking contest is a pretty representative exchange from his book:

1:58: She raises the first shot and gives me a toast, “Give me chastity and give me continence – but not yet . . . St. Augustine!” All her little friends laugh and cheer. Amateurs.

Girl: That was really sexist.”
Tucker: No it wasn’t, it was a joke. If I had said that women are nothing but life support for pussy, now THAT would be sexist.”
Girl: “Excuse me?”
Tucker: “If I had called her a hot mouth, that would be sexist too. Or, if I said that the only thing going for her is that she’s 98.6 degrees and has two wet holes, that would be very sexist. But I didn’t say those things, did I?”
Girl: “WHAT?”
Tucker: “Uh oh! Did I piss you off? Are you going to write angsty poetry?!?”

Women in the stories Tucker recounts also tend to say things along the lines of, “I can’t believe how funny I think you are and I’m a girl.” It is my opinion that they are either (a) easily manipulated chicks or (b) missing the fucking point. I’m not delusional, so I’m well aware that some people look at my own work and aren’t aware of anything deeper than quality photos of punk genitalia and gothic boobies, although there is more to it. But I do understand that sometimes pervy sex is the common denominator for a reason. Sure, Tucker regularly points out how much pussy he has thrown at him 24/7 and how great he is at acquiring even difficult pussy. His writing career started when he first launched his site as a dating application. Some chicks will always be attracted to a guy they believe other chicks want. Some guys will be impressed by any dude who claims to have laid miles of pipe. Although I went through a phase in the late 80’s where I liked to tie up blonde boys from good families, that was a long time ago, so some people will undoubtedly be surprised that I am such a huge fan of Tucker Max’s writing that I told my panelmates at the recent SXSW confab that I’d be late getting to the green room for our panel because I was going to watch Tucker Max speak at his first. Then again, readers who really got BLT, the antisocial punk rock humor zine I did in DC, well, I think they will understand the Tucker Max appeal.

The point is not that Tucker Max is a hard-drinking vanilla guy who has frequent sex with varied partners. The point is that his writing is brilliant, articulate, painfully insightful, and totally fearless and he is able to find the humor in absolutely anything. John Hargrave of Zug.com, the moderator of Tucker’s one man SXSW panel From Blog to Book called the author “a promiscuous drunken Tolstoy.” To give you an idea of the Zug perspective, my horoscope on the site today suggests I “Call a hardware store and whisper “stucco” into the phone over and over. “Stucco stucco stucco stucco stucco.” If they hang up, simply call back.” I used to manage an adult boutique where callers sometimes attempted this sort of thing. They might as well have been saying “stucco” for all the impact it had on folks who sold lingerie and vibrators, although only the serious submissives called back to speak with the manager, once I got through with them. At the end of the From Blog to Book panel, John Hargrave was kind enough to pour healthy doses of something called Tucker Max Death Mix. The ingredients of which are apparently Everclear, Lemon-Lime Gatorade, and Red Bull. No wonder so many Tucker Max Drunk stories entail such copious amounts of vomit.

Tucker Max claims to have little formal idea how to write properly. This is debatable as he went to both U Chicago and Duke Law. Both good schools. But he assured his SXSW audience that he has no clue how to use commas, confuses forms of the word ‘too’, and doesn’t really consider himself a writer. He says he tries not to consider his audience when writing, to just concentrate on telling his story in his own authentic way. “I write in my authentic voice,” he says. Oh yeah, and then he works on trimming the fat from his work. But the authenticity is key.

According to Tucker Max’s business card, the name of his company is Rudius Media. According to the Rudius web site, “a rudius is a wooden sword, given by the Roman Emperor to a gladiator upon attainment of his freedom.” It may be happy coincidence that this is probably also a play on the word ‘rude’, but whatever. The best thing about Tucker Max’s writing is the sense of abandonment, the extreme freedom. He’ll tell you his ferocious opinion of some lesser person that himself and he’ll tell you his dick is average in size, although a bit large to put in a midget or a small girl’s colon. He may be coy about whether he has ever done cocaine in Vegas, but he’ll tell you how much hostile fun he is on absinthe. He’ll detail how he drove a mildly inconsiderate girl’s car through the storefront of a donut shop. He’ll pressure all the law firms in Silcon Valley into raising their salaries for summer interns by posting sock puppet conversations with himself on Infirmation.com. He’ll tell girls he is in a Christian rap band and coerce his friends into playing along. He’ll get accidentally pepper-sprayed during the sex act. He’ll bring friends in Special Ops to a politically left wing cocktail party. He’ll get thrown out of IHOP. He’ll get thrown out of Denny’s. He’ll get thrown out of Mickey D’s. And he’ll pretty shamelessly tell you – and everyone else – about it. Although his book has been out for more than a year now, he says it is still selling a remarkable 2,000 copies a week to people like me who are just discovering him. He says he designed the flawlessly appropriate book cover himself too. Tucker Max challenges the SXSW audience to check his numbers on Bookscan because everything he says is true and this is one outlandish tale which is verifiable.

And why, you may ask, was I at the airport, while visiting my family, buying noir novels and I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell? All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Actually, I have a pretty happy family, as these things go, but that just seemed like such an elegant literate way to close that I almost couldn’t help myself. Of course, now I fucked it all up with the disclaimer.

So it has been crazy busy in the Blue Blood compound this week as we ready ourselves for the 2007 SXSW extravaganza in Austin, Texas. Gotta paint my nails and make sure my purple hair dye is fresh and, oh yeah, make sure BlueBlood.com and its associated sites will be updating in our absence. Blue Blood hottie Halcyon will be moderating the panel I am speaking on. Halcyon and I are returning speakers and I’m looking forward to meeting long-time camgirl Seska, who will be joining us this year. Forrest Black will, of course, once again be doing press photography of the whole shebang and some editorial afterwards.

If I remember to bring them in all the hullaballoo of modern air travel, I will also be giving out some free SpookyCash T-shirts. They are 100% cotton black T-shirts with kickass original artwork by the incomparable Ed Mironiuk.

Here are the details of my panel for those who wish to stop by, reap the fabulous benefits of my wisdom, and say howdy:

Panel Title: Pay Up! Should Publishers Choose the Porn Path?
Panel Location: Room 9AB, Panel Date: Saturday, March 10th, Panel Time: 5pm-6pm
SXSW Panel Description: “As the public becomes more comfortable paying for premium content and services, what can we learn from the pornographic trailblazers? What billing models and payment systems are working online in porn that would successfully crossover to mainstream? What types of content and services are ready for the Porn Path of Pay to Peruse? The panel will include veterans in the online adult industry discussing relevant trends and lessons learned.”

Despite the lurid title, the main topic is essentially a discussion of the pay-for-content business model (which allows Blue Blood to give back to the community with all the free goodies you all get to enjoy.) I’ll have more to say on the SXSW panel and I’ll probably post more here later, but, in brief, SpookyCash is the Business2Business affiliate system by which people with high traffic websites can make some beer money by linking to some of the membership sites we support. I’ll explain more later, but that is the core of it.

I’d also like to state for the record that Halcyon totally came up with the name for our panel. I don’t make porn and I tend to be suspicious of people who really segregate their sexuality from who they are as human beings. For example, if you like light bondage and you also like Nine Inch Nails (Thanks for advertising again, Trent.) then you would ideally seek a partner who enjoys both. I think porn porn tends to isolate the act from the personality and I find that really lame. But “Pay Up! Should Publishers Choose the Porn Path?” is a catchy title. Last time we spoke, our panel got one of the highest ratings of any panel at SXSW and I’m hoping Halcyon’s inflammatory title will incite even more interested souls to attend. Hopefully, despite the raunchy title, our audience this year will be as interesting and friendly as last time.

This feature was originally published May 18, 2005. With this year’s SXSW looming close, I thought it would be fun to bring it back.
–Amelia G

photography by Forrest Black

Every time I take a trip to some place which is not Manhattan or San Francisco, I start drooling at real estate. Property is at such a premium in Los Angeles that I can’t help it. On my recent jaunt to SXSW, the cab driver who picked me and Forrest Black up at the airport must have known this. He launched into the most amazing dissertation on the socioeconomics of the city of Austin. He told us that 120,000 of the city’s residents are students at any given time. The majority of cab drivers have at least a Bachelors. The city is the live music capitol of the U.S. and perhaps the world. Nightlife is hopping. Booze stops flowing at 2am, but some clubs stay open dry until 4am on weekends. Finding nightclubs which serve coffee should not be difficult. Panhandling is not totally uncommon. High speed wireless access is quite common. There was once a student at UT Austin who dropped out after his frosh year much to his doctor father and stockbroker mother’s dismay, but now he is one of the biggest employers in Austin and his name is Michael Dell, you might have heard of him. Forrest and I might even have gotten some tips on playing Texas Holdem as the cabbie was also a tournament poker player, but alas we arrived at the Hilton. I kicked myself for the rest of the week for not getting that first fascinating and wonderful cab driver’s phone number. Later on we kept getting this chick who must have bribed her way or something into being the main cab driver in front of the Hilton during the big SXSW convention and she was a total scammer who repeatedly claimed not to have change and snarfed an extra $20 from us when she dropped us off at the airport at the end. Regardless, being used to the cablessness of Los Angeles, it was kind of nice to be able to be driven places fairly easily.

The checkin guy at the Hilton was adorable and super friendly and nice and I headed upstairs to sack out. Due to loathsomeness on the part of American Airlines, which I will for the moment spare you all the details of, I sort of missed the first night of SXSW Interactive. It involved a talk about the success of Alien Hominid I think. My bed at the Hilton was tiny but the mattress was oh so very comfy and the sheets felt super nice to the touch. Apparently a prior guest had broken into my mini bar before I checked in. The Hilton folks were amazingly nice and friendly and told me that sometimes this happens with underage guests who they don’t give a bar key.

I ate at a place called The Boiling Pot my first night in town. Not only did they have crawfish which I expected, but they also served blue crabs which I had thought were something one could only get in the Chesapeake Bay area. The waitress was charming and friendly and discussed my beverage tastes with me. I couldn’t get sparkling water, but she recommended the local Shiner Blonde based on my preferences and totally steered me right. Shiner Bock by the same company is apparently more commonly consumed but is a bit darker craft beer.

I ate waffles and steak for breakfast the next day at the Hilton and the hostess was friendly and the waitress was so amazing she almost made me like morning. I kept waking up early and eating breakfast in Austin and then wanting to go back to sleep. Of course, I had panels and seminars and keynote speeches and such to go to most days, so I ended up a little sleep-deprived the whole time. I was not alone in this though. The panel I got up earliest for was the Blogging Software showdown which was totally worth losing a few zzzz for. It always makes me happy when something I enjoy is created by someone who is just as great as I would want them to be. Matthew Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, came across so passionate and brilliant that it made me feel all warm and fuzzy about loving his creation.

The second day Halcyon and Tassy swept into town. They had just participated in a reality show in Jamaica. They basically got to the airport in San Diego, pulled some things out of their bags, threw some clean things in, and headed back to the airport to hit Texas. Despite all this air travel, they looked tanned and lovely and once they arrived, the party got going in earnest.

Apparently famous cyberpunk author and futurist Bruce Sterling used to always give a party at his house during SXSW Interactive. But now he has succumbed to the siren song of Los Angeles. So Wired sponsored him throwing a shindig at an American Legion Hall where he ran around in pajamas demonstrating how a still works. Actually most of the parties were just as educational as the seminars because of the intelligence and curiosity about the world of the people partying. Ben Brown, the self-proclaimed Internet Rockstar, gave a bash at his Home for Wayward Boys which includes a hot tub and which a biker-looking cabbie told us was in a shifty neighborhood. Whatever that means. Looked great to me, although I guess the host did say something about bodies being dumped in the area. Then again, some folks just need killin’. Blogger gave a party and we got groovy baseball caps. Gawker gave a party at a bar which is one of an apparent 211 nightlife locations in Austin which chose to be smoking establishments. What this means is that patrons can smoke in side, but everybody has to be over eighteen years of age. I guess so second-hand smoke won’t stunt their growth or something. This bar didn’t have Shiner Blonde, so I had a Lone Star to keep with the local theme, but it wasn’t totally my thing, so I switched to Amaretto sours. I appreciate Gawker buying me the drinks but kind of wish I hadn’t mixed alcohols.

Halcyon, among other things, is in the process of launching a site called Pinkgasm with Tassy. He says it is going to be “love-infused porn” and I believe him. Jonno D’Addario is the editor of my favorite sex news site Fleshbot. Halcyon and Jonno are collectively two of my favorite people who move in online naughtiness circles. When I told Halcyon, who is a SXSW vet, that I wanted to go to the convention this year, he set me up to speak on a panel called “The Business of Pleasure: Turning Pink Into Green.” For the record, he named it, not me. The convention quite reasonably thought we should have a third person on the panel. Halcyon asked me who I thought would be good and Jonno was the first person I thought of. We both loved the idea of having him speak with us and happily the convention organizer agreed. I was a little bit worried that the panel would be such a lovefest that we wouldn’t be interesting enough for the audience. But we actually got together beforehand and planned and stuff and, although we all like each other, our viewpoints and experiences are not identical, so I think the panel actually went super well.

I’ve spoken in front of a lot of different audiences over the years, but this one was very different. I try to pay careful attention to audience response and see which topics I should spend more time on, according to what they seem most interested in. This was a new experience for me because the audience was so techie that many of them were blogging about the panel while it was going on or talking in IRC about the panel. The conference takes place in a convention center with wireless access in every nook and cranny. I definitely came home thinking that I crave all sorts of new tech toys.

Returning to eating which is my favorite thing to do, the Blue Blood contingent all lunched in Austin with a bunch of cool interesting people at a place with Asian food of some sort called Mekong Somethingorother which was pretty nummy. There were whole shrimps with the tail still on sticking out of my sort of egg roll and the lemonade was delicious. In the middle of the night, the always-open Magnolia Cafe supplied me with a taste of gingerbread pancakes and other folks with all sorts of Tex-Mex breakfast fare. No bottled water though. We ate pizza at a place which played death metal. Loudly. We ate pizza at a bunch of other places nestled in between clubs with different sorts of music emanating. We ate at a place called Jazz which specializes in cajun food and we got to eat beignets made from mix shipped in from Cafe du Monde in New Orleans and fried oysters. It seems like every place in Austin features raw oysters, so I knew they had to have fresh ones, but I like mine cooked thanks and was overjoyed to find such especially excellent fried ones on my last day. Technically, I guess I also had cooked oysters at Finn & Porter, the Hilton’s higher end restaurant, but they had some creative wasabi thing going which would probably be done better where I live, although the service was great and the steak was perfect and, unlike most every other place in Austin, they had some damn sparkling water for me.

It is really easy to get booze and coffee in Austin, but it is kind of difficult to get anything actually thirst-quenching. Juice tends to be high quality when found but not too common and sparkling water is just a fantasy. Austin is right off a river so it is much less dry than Vegas, but I got way more dehydrated there. Forrest opined that perhaps this dearth of hydrating beverages is the reason cowboys look like raisins. I tend to think this must be an accurate observation.

But I could be a pruney mofo with some damn affordable real estate in a great walking neighborhood with friendly if sometimes a little disorganized denizens. Then again, Bruce Sterling is a smart guy and he left Austin for Southern Cali. More research in the field is clearly called for. Now where should I check out next . . .