in pbs’ mediashift column by mark glaser

Ms. Violet Blue (@violetblue) is an investigative tech reporter at CNET, Zero Day, ZDNet, and CBS News, as well as an award-winning sex author and columnist, making her the foremost expert in the field of sex and technology. She travels to hacker conferences and hacker gatherings around the world to cover hacking, cybercrime and personal privacy violations in countries such as Malaysia, Germany, Morocco, China, the Dominican Republic, the United States, and Serbia. In 2012, Blue presented “Hackers as a High-Risk Population” bringing harm reduction to the featured stage for CCC’s 29c3 hacker conference in Hamburg. She is an Advisor to Without My Consent, a Member of the Internet Press Guild, a Member of the Center for Investigative Reporting, and is an Editor on the Board for Routledge's Porn Studies Journal.

Blue appears on CNN and The Oprah Winfrey Show and is regularly interviewed, quoted, and featured in a variety of publications that includes ABC News and the Wall Street Journal. She has authored and edited award-winning, best selling books in eight translations - one is excerpted on Oprah Winfrey's website - and has been a sex columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. She has been at the center of many Internet scandals, including Google’s “nymwars” and Libya’s web domain censorship and seizures—Forbes calls her “omnipresent on the web” and named her a Forbes Web Celeb. She has given keynote talks at such conferences as ETech, LeWeb, and the Forbes Brand Leadership Conference, she received a standing ovation at Seattle’s Gnomedex, and has given two Tech Talks at Google.

Violet Blue bio courtesy TTI Vanguard. Photo of Violet Blue by Samantha Wolov.

The London Times named Blue "one of the 40 bloggers who really count.”

"One of the leading figures in tech writing in the world - Violet Blue." -Clarissa Smith, Guardian UK

"Superstar sex writer - Violet Blue." -Dan Savage

"Violet Blue is omnipresent on the Web." –Forbes

"America’s leading (very) public intellectual sexologist, Violet Blue." -The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

"Violet Blue is the leading sex educator for the Internet generation." -Webnation

Tweets by @violetblue