Indistinguishable from Pornography

"Porn" for the purposes of this study was defined as "any picture or video you suddenly lose interest in after masturbating."

-- David Wong

Mom: Why do people look at porn?

Me: That's hard to explain. Why do people play video games, or watch sunsets?

Mom: I don't know why people like video games, but sunsets are beautiful and natural.

Me: Naked women are beautiful and natural.

My mom is always asking me to stop mentioning porn on my blog, saying it might drive away potential girlfriends. But on Christmas, she almost encouraged me to hang one of Diana Kos's nude paintings in my apartment. I'm so confused that I don't even know whether to mark that link as NSFW.

Users rarely look at display advertisements on websites. Of the four design elements that do attract a few ad fixations, one is unethical.

Can you guess which eye-attracting ad design element Jakob Nielsen considers unethical?

1. Plain text
2. Faces
3. Cleavage and other "private" body parts
4. Similarity in design to page content

(Read Jakob's article for the answer.)

A Google search for "leave" still reflects the time when most porn sites had "age verification" on their front pages. "Age verification" often took the form of the text "You must be 18 to enter" followed by "Enter" and "Leave" links. The "Leave" link would often lead to a site appropriate for young kids or to a sex-education site.

Even today, when few new sites follow this practice, "Leave No Trace" and "Leave It To Beaver" are beaten by Yahoo, Google, Scarleteen, and Disney.

I wondered why Google's algorithm continued to make this possible despite tweaks to prevent Googlebombs such as "miserable failure". I came across this comment by Google engineer Matt Cutts:

[The algorithm change] really does have a very limited scope and doesn’t affect a large fraction of queries. The intent of the algorithm is to minimize the impact of “true” Googlebombs, which occur when someone is causing someone else’s page to rank for stuff that they wouldn’t want to rank for themselves. The algorithm could detect phrases such as [leave] as a Googlebomb in future iterations, but it doesn’t right now and I don’t think that Disney would care much either way.

Googlebombs were slightly embarrassing, but I imagine that abandoning link text would have hurt search quality a lot. I'm impressed that Google was able to come up with an algorithmic way to distinguish Googlebombs from other link text.

I've been a fan of Enigma, especially the songs "Mea Culpa" and "Sadeness (part II)", for over a year. Today, I found out that "Sadeness" is part of a three-part movement (along with a song called "Find Love") and listened to the other parts for the first time.

Wow. I didn't know it was possible for music to be pornographic.

Like Robert Accettura, I frequently get emails from strangers asking for Gmail invites, help with Firefox problems, or JavaScript code. But this one caught me by surprise:

From: Juliano
To: Jesse Ruderman
Date: Dec 27, 2006 8:45 AM
Subject: HI....... porn?? Firefox or Opera????

Hello,

The dillema I am facing is. I love surfing porn. I am with Windows Internet Explorer 6 and have had a NIGHTmare surfing porn with it. I dont need the stress, so need some advice.

People have recommended Firefox, as you have. But I am also hearing now that Opera is best. So I am confused, and yet feel URGENT need to actualize one of the other. For sanity sake.

Can you help?

Julian

Anti-porn site pornwar.info is hosting a contest, Cleanzilla, for creating a Firefox extension to help users avoid porn.

It was recently brought to my attention that there is a group out there working to create extensions for Firefox in an effort to make it the best internet browser for surfing porn on the web. Pornzilla, as they call themselves, have taken the open source browser Firefox, a personal favorite of mine, and worked to make it hyper-efficient at doing the very thing I am seeking to avoid.

Therefore, I have decided to return the favor, and begin an annual contest. PORN WAR.INFO will hold an annual showcase for aspiring and seasoned programmers seeking to gain greater recognition on the net.

Starting this March, I will hold the 1st Annual “Cleanzilla” Safer-Browsing Firefox extension contest.

The goal is to create a useful, innovative, and effective extension for the latest version of the open source Mozilla Firefox browser, which will help to create a cleaner, safer, browsing experience on the web.

There's about a week left in the contest. If the winning entry is good, I might use it -- I don't like to encounter pornography when I'm not looking for it.

About 20% of Firefox installations include a crash-reporting tool called Talkback. If Firefox crashes, Talkback gives the user a chance to send information about the crash to Mozilla, along with optional comments. This information is mostly used to determine which crashes are the most frequent and to help developers fix the crashes.

In the last 40 days, Talkback has collected information about 105 crashes where the user mentioned porn. Many of these comments are amusing, and some are baffling. Highlights:

• jackin it to porn
• looking at porn you know during work
• I was doing a homework assignment for sex education he wanted to look at gay porn for free so we know what sex looks like if we hadn't already had it so PLEASE STOP! i am over 18!
• Surfing porn. Why, oh why, must you drag me away from my porn? (Okay, it was "literary smut" from Nerve. But, well, COME ON!)
• Accessing a recipe website when a pop-up porn ad appeared
• Surfing porn. Dude, what the hell, I need my pr0n!
• Not looking at porn.
• I tried to figure out the different codecs that are necessary for watching video if you are running Gxine or Mplayer etc. in Rammemory of Puppy linux. Win32 got their own and it costs. So I use pornosites to check. The easiest way to find clips.
• I watched a damn good porn for which I payed 20$ per minute...
• Trying to enjoy the internet. And porn wasn't even involved.
• i was on my space i wasn't looking at porn or anything i hope my space is not an illegal program