Porn gets a lot of credit for pushing technology forward. You probably owe your DVD player and your video-on-demand service to dedicated porn fans with discretionary income. But as web technology evolves to support true personalization and community -- into Web 2.0 -- porn is falling further behind the curve.
Like content was king in the 1990s, in the days of Web 2.0, community is the kingdom.
Community is all about interactivity and personalization. Given the interactive nature of sex and the personal nature of porn, you'd think adult sites would be all over Web 2.0. But with a few notable exceptions, they're not. And I think this is going to bite them in the ass not too far into the future if they don't catch up.
For the porn industry, which is at least as paranoid about piracy as the Recording Industry Association of America, allowing open data formats that let users to do with content what they will does not come naturally.
But Jason Tucker of No Rivals Media (NSFW), which builds interactive sites for adult webmasters, makes a compelling business case for why adult webmasters should keep pace with the mainstream.
Tucker points to Google Images as an example. "Different people name the same images, and the computer finds the word matches. Those become tags," he says. "Think of how (useful) this is for porn."
The more webmasters let us mash up content, the more they can discover what users are tagging, sharing and checking out on their sites. Are those sections popular because of what they hold, or because of their position on the page? What are users saying on the boards, in the comments? Who is the most vocal?
Webmasters can then better serve us by
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