Tech archive

It appears that Ping-o-matic, a service that passes on update pings from blogs to several search engines and is used by default in Wordpress installs, may not want to handle traffic from sites with adult content. From Dougal Campbell’s blog:

> Do you have any idea of why I can not ping your site anymore?

Because we don’t want pings from porn sites?

What disturbs me about this post:

• No reason is given for blocking the site, other than their content.
  Obviously if this person was abusing the service, that would be understandable grounds for removal. But no mention is made of that.
• Porn is equated with spam
  Dougal placed his post in the “spam” category. Again, no mention was made of abuse of the service, the site being a known spammer, or what have you — just that it’s a “porn site.”

  Given the way some people in the industry choose to handle their business, it’s not entirely surprising that many (most?) people equate porn with spam. But it’s flawed thinking, not unlike equating labor unions with organized crime, or George W. Bush with christianity.

• What exactly is a “porn site?”
  Is it just commercial sites that make you pay for access to pornographic materials, or does it include any site that has adult content? What about SugarBank, or Wilful Damage, or Ms Kitka?
• Ping-o-matic has no terms of service information
  Ping-o-matic is privately owned, and is well within their legal rights to deny service to anyone they choose. If they are going to deny use of their service based purely on site content, though, it only seems fair that they tell you up front. They don’t have to, I guess, but it’s not unreasonable to expect.

3xL writes:

Rubber Hoky, a Canadian latex fetishist, has announce the debut of a new podcast called “Rubber Canada”. Hoky created the show to cover the latex and rubber fetish scene in Canada, and is aiming for a bi-weekly frequency.

The first official podcast features an interview with Eric Paradis about Polymorphe, Club Sin and the upcoming Fetish Weekend in Montreal, as well as a film review of a Gwen Media title.

Hoky invite you all to check out the show (instructions for listening to podcasts are on the website) and give me your feedback. So if you are in Canada and have some knowledge of the fetish scene there, or know of any other goings on, please let him know. He might just call you up for an interview!

Visit: www.rubbercanada.com

From Lockergnome: Microsoft Announces RSS Support: Marketers, It’s Time:

It’s finally official. The next Internet Explorer and operating system from Microsoft will have RSS functionality integrated, thus finally opening the way for mass RSS penetration. It’s time for marketers to wake up an embrace RSS as a standard communicational channel.

I am consistently surprised at how few adult webmasters are utilizing XML-based syndication technologies like RSS, especially in this genre, where your customers tend to be on the tech-savvy side. RSS is an extremely easy way to keep all of your audiences (customers, PR outlets, etc) aware of content updates and important news, and getting a feed going on your site is really easy (if your tech folks know what they’re doing, at least). Very little of the content featured on this site is not distributed via RSS.

Up until this point, you could sorta make the argument that utilizing RSS wasn’t essential, because about 90% of the general computer-using market didn’t know jack squat about it. This announcement, however, ensures that RSS and related technologies will achieve mass-market penetration in short order. Webmasters who do not start leveraging RSS will be at a severe disadvantage in terms of marketing and audience interaction.