the engine house

Time and time again technology advances have been driven by human desires to access pornography in more and more private ways. Whatever your view on it, countless advances have been driven by pornographers and their customers.

From the VHS win over the Betamax, through to the development of DVD players, interactive TV, Subscription TV services and of course the internet, pornographers and their customers have helped push technology forward.Now we sit in the midst of the Web 2.0 world, will we see a similar drive from the industry to help promote the ideals and principles of the Web 2.0 project? (Click for link to 2002 Story from The Observer)

Looking at the recent success of services such as Xtube which boasts it has 2 million members are we once again seeing pornography drive development of Web 2.0 through Porn 2.0? Here is an excerpt and statistics lifted off the Xtube Wiki:

The first day XTube went online (March 12th 2006) there were 5 user signups. By the end of March there were 167 members. At the end of April there were 326 members – a 100% increase. At the end of May there were 14,308 members – a 4200% increase!

As of July 2007

Traffic Alexa Rank: 257 (.14% Reach) 5,170,846 Visits per day,
19,221,967 Pageviews per day

Daily Signups

Sexual Orientation

1,215,042 Straight
994,908 Gay
901,641 Bisexual
603 Unknown Sexual Orientation

Gender

2,594,101 Male
181,281 Female
336,553 Unknown

Whatever happens we cannot argue that as it goes the sites achieving the highest rates will probably follow in the footsteps of other technologies. However, if it brings improvements in technology to a wider audience can it really be all bad?

Any comments welcome!

Footnote: I just want to add that this blog is in itself a test of these theories. As a user of WordPress I can see statistics relating to how people come to this blog and I wanted to see how adding tags, such as; porn 2.0, porn, sex and pornography would affect page views. I will let you know once the figures are in!!