December 2006

Isn’t this a great screengrab? Here’s the URL to 67-year-old Spaniard gives birth to twins — dig the awesome text ad links. (Thanks, Sam!)

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Yay, it’s New Years Eve! Smooches to everyone who made this a fabulous year on Tiny Nibbles, and in my life — which are pretty much one and the same. It’s been a crazy year for many people, and while the pain was, well, painful, the people I’ve become close to and the experiences I’ve had I wouldn’t trade for a year of happy days.

One of the most valuable relationships I have in the world is with you, dear readers (and emailers). Thank you for spending a little time with me. Sometimes your emails have brought me back from the edge; sometimes they’ve made me squeal and squirm in my office chair; sometimes they’ve even made me weep a bit in love for the world.

I’ll be going to a party later where there’s wi-fi and I’ll be bringing my camera and laptop — and will hopefully be uploading between cocktails to my Flickr stream. Hang out with me there, if you like.

Much love and peace to all. Next year is going to be ten times more sexy, fun, entertaining, just fucking weird and exciting. I have lots of blogging to do, I hope to find some kind of weird new writing/media job to add to the mix, I’ll have oodles of sex info-art-sites-news to tell you about — and more controversy to stir up. Um, because I’m so quiet, retiring and shy… I think I should get out of my shell a bit more as a resolution, don’t you think?

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If you’ve been keeping up with this story, you’ll notice that it’s been hitting the blogs (like this good post over at Wired, Google’s Bad Hair Week) like crazy. At first glance it looked like Google fixed some kind of issue for the main blogs making all the noise (like mine and Tony’s), but the more I went back to doing my normal work, the more I noticed that it wasn’t just me that was having problems, but many of the sites I was link mining for.

Mind you, I’m a power-user when it comes to Google. I have the search-fu, and I have an uncanny knack for remembering what I read online, who wrote it and where I can find it. I have a few precise techniques I use to get the exact thing I’m looking for to come out on top in Google so my work is fast and easy when I’m compiling posts or articles. However, when I put together the Top Ten Sex Memes of 2006 post for Boing Boing, I almost lost my mind trying to find links that should have been a snap to call up. Most notably, I couldn’t for the life of me get specific Boing Boing posts to come up as a primary result — I could only get secondary content referring to the posts, which is frustrating beyond belief when you’re trying to get a URL. I spent a long time trying to get Boing Boing’s “Google: search this site” to work, to no avail. To get the URLs of posts I knew were there, I had to go into the archives, only a few months old. And yes, Boing Boing knows about it now; I’m sure they’ll get help from Google.

Sane thing happened when I was trying to find Mark Morford’s SFGate article about Google Trends. I typed in (no quotes) Mark Morford Google Trends and got secondary content. I did many variables, even adding sfgate (another technique of mine to get right to the URL) and got nothing. I wound up going into the SFGate archives and looking page by page to find the article.

Now when I type in Mark Morford Google Trends the article comes up at the top. But when I repeat my Boing Boing searches, still secondary reproductions of the content (or merely mentions on other blogs). And while “Violet Blue” was temporarily restored to the top spot, it’s slipped again to #3, and if you look for my Top Ten Sexiest Geeks of 2006 post, you can only find sites mentioning or mirroring reposts about my original post on other sites.

So it’s not just me, but I’m in a hell of a quandary, as a someone who wants to have their content found, and as a blogger/online columnist who uses Google as a tool — and needs it to function properly. It’s not.

I’ll concede that I need to clean up the code on my blog, but I’m just guessing (as we all are) as to why this suddenly *might* need to be done.

Nick Denton asked me if Google responded to me, and the answer is still no. But Google’s Matt Cutts responded to Tony Comstock, and then some. I do feel odd that I’m left out of any of the ongoing discussion that’s between the guys, namely Tony and Matt. Matt has been asking Tony a lot of questions about sex on the web, something I’ve been blogging about for years professionally, with some pretty stringent ethics in my link practices. I also wrote a book about porn, with a chapter (and more) on safe porn surfing (along with my highly trafficked and much reposted porn-and-sex-on-the-internet tutorial*).

* This page also no longer comes up in search as it had previously, nor its Boing Boing repost which I also can’t find right now to point you to, aaargh. Maybe that’s why Cutts didn’t think to include me in his queries about sex on the web, because he tried to search for information on Google and came up dry.

Perhaps the most informative and best article about this whole mess is Jason Miller’s Google Hates Indie Porn? Miller explains a possibility: Google’s supposedly new 30-rank penalty for violating its automated spam detection system. To me, this means two things. If this is part of the problem, then blogs and sites can fall off the map (as it were) at any minute, making any given Google search — a snapshot in web time — impossible to accept as ever being accurate. It also means that if the Google penalty is invoked by a sudden increase in link traffic, then people can be dropped at any time for being good at what they do.

Still frustrating in all this, is seeing blogs like Search Engine Land and Wired come up in Google News with this story, but not Boing Boing.

Ultimately what it all means to me is that I need to find a better tool for my work.

Update, from my brain: Um, seriously read Tony’s utterly fucking eye-opening post where he goes back and forth with the head of Google’s webspam team about Google trying to find out what sex and porn sites are “good” and “bad”. (And, I am extremely disturbed by this good vs. bad thing in reference to something so subjective and individuated, as human sexuality is, *and* I wonder what is going to happen with this information.) It’s clear by reading this post that Google absolutely does not have the tools — or current knowledge — to evaluate sex on the web. And possibly a lot of other things as well. This is how they do it? Really? They need a community liaison for each of the types of spam they’re expected to deal with, because it’s crystal clear they are in the dark. Okay, and the Google guy’s pick of True Porn Clerk Stories? Um, this was over in 2002, so I guess I can at least give him credit for admitting he’s out of date with the current online sex culture… *huge sad sigh*

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Over at Boing Boing I have a guest post (w00t!), The Top Ten Sex Memes of 2006, snip:

“Memes snake around and wind up on everyone’s blogs, sites, get injected into inboxes and become just generally known by most without widespread recognition from a news or mainstream media site. They propagate, survive, spread and mutate, through a user-supported natural selection process. Typically — and especially with sex memes — they’re too scary or NSFW to get any official traffic. And yet everyone finds out about them, and are fascinated for at least one solid minute. But the best part of sex memes, besides the weirdness and snarky wrong ironic humor? The gap between perception and reality is often a goatse-like chasm…

10. Celebrity Cooch Flash-A-Palooza
I’m just relieved that leatherface Joan Rivers isn’t on the cooch-flashing bandwagon this year, but if trends continue through 2007, we’ll be seeing that (no doubt) surgical wonder in no time. Pretending to flash your pantyless pundenda was the new black for starlets 85 lbs. and above and they made the webrounds like a coke-encrusted credit card in the Marmont bathroom. On the list: Pam, Paris, Britney (don’t forget the “sex tape” — *yawn*), Lindsay… even D-list porn stars like Mary Carey gave it a try (and gets a double “D” for effort).” Link.

Read more — there are some really interesting/creepy/hilarious things on that list. Also of interest (general), BoingBoing’s most-trafficked posts of 2006 (and all time). And some fun new posts of mine over at Fleshbot (of note), the Google-spanking Femdomart, The Wiibrator.

(photo via Hot Octopus Love, in my Sex Meme list)

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For this week’s column, I went over the past year in news and blogs relating to sex, and came up with The Top Ten Sex Stories of 2006. There are different than sex memes, in that they were news stories that were developed and told — though a few were underreported, and I wanted to shine a little light on them. What struck me was that these important and interesting stories came form a variety of sources, from Rolling Stone to Boing Boing to Time Magazine — and yet, still Boing Boing isn’t indexed by Google News, a news tool I use over a dozen times a day. Why?

Anyway, this is a very fun piece (OMG I got to say “hanky-flagging space sluts” in teh chronic) — it’s my snapshot of a year in sex stories — snip:

“If the year in major sex stories were to be written like a Craigslist personal ad, it would sound something like this:

‘Horny Einstein with HPV seeks a little Girls Gone Wild action in space. No sex toys, please, as they are toxic, but respond to this CL ad if you want to play Justice Department and get all up in my 2257, if domain names are your kink, and you love the Matrix but fantasize most about Neo’s secret lingerie drawer. No griefers.’

(…)

4. Sex in Space

In space, no one can hear you masturbate. At least that was the theory tossed (ahem) about the Internet and in print this year, especially when Laura S. Woodmansee came out with the well-researched (and highly amusing) book Sex in Space. Aside from jokes about getting fluids out of your hair, the choreography of connection and not leaving condoms on the console, MSNBC’s science writer Alan Boyle remarked that ‘new devices and data would be required to hit the zero-g g-spot,’ and zero-gravity veteran Xeni Jardin got a sex-positive microgravity post going on Boing Boing that garnered comments from pro-abstinence pseudo-Christians as well as hanky-flagging space sluts.” Link.

(snapshot pic by Scott Beale)

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