I recently made a comment regarding Joanna Angel in reference to ‘altporn’ and… well, it’s a shitstorm.

Gossip and rumor aren’t what this blog’s about and I’ve never met Ms. Angel. I could have got this all wrong and people keep telling me I have so, for the record:

I quoted Joanna in a movie, which I haven’t seen, saying something I thought was an excellent example of things not being cool in groovyaltpornville. It was fresh in my mind because it was part of a discussion I’d had with the director of the movie for an upcoming podcast and it shocked me. I was told it was part of a videotaped ‘confession’ and I wasn’t under the impression was staged. Now I’m being told it was and, if I was too dumb to pick up on that, came to the wrong conclusion and made Joanna look like a racist unfairly, then I apologize. My point about much ‘altporn’ being totally conventional beneath the superficialities is still true even if I messed up my evidence.

So everyone who’s emailing me on this from Silverlake please chill out. I don’t know Joanna but I’m sure I’d love her. In fact Joanna - drop me a line, I’d love to interview you about this and everything else you do. Everyone loves you and I know that because they’re telling me I’m an asshole.
I’m far from perfect and would hate to be the victim of a negative public accusation that’s entirely incorrect. If I’ve inadvertently abused my platform that’s bad, and why this is here now.

Joanna - I’m sorry.

(On a a side note a link in yesterdays post was broken so please read this today.)

PS. First rule of blogging - don’t be afraid to admit you made a mistake.

The best of the sex blogs by the bloggers who blog them.

Thoughts on Sex: Sex Commentary, Sex Advice, Blogging
All About Oral: Odor, Etiquette, and Why Some Women Don’t Want It (cuntinglinguist.blogspot.com)
Anatomy Lessons Part 2 (swelteringcelt.com)
And it Burns, Burns, Burns… (sexeteria.blogspot.com)
Classic S Spot - More on Masturbation (shayssexcolumn.blogspot.com)
Damn Leeches! (anawtymouz.blogspot.com)
His Addiction (onaniajournal.blogspot.com)
Love Conquers Some But Not All (realadultsex.com)
Pussy on the Loose (taratainton.com)

Funny / Sex News / Grab Bag
10 Lies Pornographers Tell (sugarbank.com)
Angelina Puts Collagen Rumors to Bed (tgp.com)
I Bet You Didn’t Know the Ancient Greeks Had Strap-ons… (tirepaddle.com)
Last Night Dick Slipped… (janeluvsdick.com)
Sex in the News - Celebrity Sex Tales (seskuality.com)
Shit Week (nakedloftparty.com)

Reviews and Interviews
Interview with Sophia (chillivanilla.com/blg/)
Sugarjoy Review: Xervious Anime Labs (sugarjoy.com)

BDSM and Fetish
Always Ready… (seanandmel.blogspot.com)
Bath Time (ropegirl.blogspot.com)
Daddy’s Little Girl (redvelvetropeburn.blogspot.com)
Edging (sheenv.blogspot.com)
Learning the Ropes (avaadora.blogspot.com)
Missing the Kink (mnsss.blogspot.com)
Put in Place I (lifeashis.com)
Recurring Springtime Fantasy (aliferestarted.blogspot.com)
Redemption - Part II (nyc-urban-gypsy.blogspot.com)
Tied Down and Spanked (auntyagony.net)

NSFW Pics
Ariel X Again and Again… (eroticandy.blogspot.com)
Christine Young Review (internetisforporn.com)
Free Pics (seska4lovers.com)
Maddi and Rene on Sapphic Erotica (simply-sapphicerotica.com)
Mim shot by Penelope for Abby Winters (iloveabbywinters.com)
Mirrors (pspporn.com)
Misato by Yousoudo for Met-Art (sensualarousalblog.com)
Naughty, Nasty HNT! (sexblogthis.blogspot.com)
Sunshine (lumpesse.com)

Erotica/Erotic Experiences
Between the Biker & the Wall (bikersballsandteacherstits.blogspot.com)
Cock Tease (sexyukgirl.blogspot.com)
First Meeting (secretsofadirtygirl.blogspot.com)
Hard Fucking (everythingoze.blogspot.com)
I Saw. I Came. I was Conquered. (theholidaylife.blogspot.com)
Last Night (whatsexmaycome.blogspot.com)
Magically Delicious (fourstate.blogspot.com)
Masturbating in the Car (alwaysarousedgirl.blogspot.com)
Masturbation and Memories (philosophyofbeing.blogspot.com)
Please, I Would Love A Kiss (suburbansexpot.blogs.com)
Secret Reads: The Roommate (secretbrain.blogspot.com)
Shhh… Do You Hear That? (v-boat.blogspot.com)
Snatched Moments (gentlygently.blogspot.com)
Sunday Sweetness (antisojo.livejournal.com)
When He Watches (tangysweet.blogspot.com)

Experiences
From Fantasy to Reality (emergingontheotherside.blogspot.com)
Kicking Myself In The Ass (stilettodiaries.blogspot.com)
Life with an Easy Girlfriend (hotcouple.co.uk)

Sex Work
Packing for a Spanking Shoot (adelehaze.com)
Wearing Your Inner Vixen (tinastrangeworld.blogspot.com)

Announcements and Sex Politics
Britney Spears Pro-Life Statue (spiritsex.blogspot.com)
Jorge Rivas (sugarpit.com)
New Book Review (cakenyc.com)

In all the recent debate about violent porn, the missing element has been first hand accounts from the people involved in making it so…

In January AVN printed a comprehensively overlooked interview with Kahn Tusion, director of 2000’s ‘Rough Sex’, a movie the adult industry has withdrawn from sale due to concerns over its extreme content. He works with JM Productions, distributors of the now infamous ‘Donkey Punch’.

His interview isn’t online so I’ve gone to the effort of transcribing it here:

Is Kahn Tusion the Most Misunderstood Man in Porn?

If the adult business is an industry of pariahs, then middle-aged, well heeled Kahn Tusion is a pariah among pariahs. “Respectable” pornographers speak of him and his degrading, male-dom ‘Meat Holes’ line and other series for - what else? - his Pariah Productions (distributed by JM Productions) in hushed disdainful tones. Their attitude is indicative of Porn Valley being in some aspects a pretty vanilla place, clueless as to the ways of more sophisticated BDSM. Yes, Tusion is a sadist - primarily an emotional one, but with some physicality - whose fetish is getting inside the heads of his girls, finding their weaknesses, then pushing their buttons until they melt down in a flurry of tears and running mascara. But it’s all consensual. In other words, standard operating procedure in the fetish world, only with the sex roles reversed (funny how none of Tusion’s critics ever voice concern about BDSM titles in which the men are degraded). He’s also a self avowed misogynist, but tellingly, counts many women among his friends. Besides, let’s give this brutally honest, frequently funny guy points for owning up to his hostility toward the opposite sex. More denizens of the 91311 be as frank and self-aware. This interview represents an attempt to get inside his head.

AVN: Are you the most misunderstood man in porn?

Kahn Tusion: Yeah. Absolutely.

AVN: Why?

Tusion: Well, because the opinion of me has been taken by a mob mentality. People say some terrible, disingenuous, untrue things about me, and it just perpetuates from one person to another, all by people that have never worked with me. Of all the people that have worked with me, a larger percentage have positive things to say about me, as opposed to the normal experience with any other porn director. I’m more straightforward, more candid and probably more generous than most porn directors out there.

AVN: What’s the stereotypical opinion of you by people that don’t know you?

Tusion: Ultimately they believe I take advantage of the girls, which is absolutely untrue. Under no circumstances do I take advantage of the girls. Not only so I shoot only girls that are interested in an erotic experience derived from degradation and rough sex and/or slightly violent sex, but I vet them from top to bottom on every single behavior prior to the scene beginning.

AVN: And you respect their limits correct?

Tusion: Oh, God yeah. Absolutely.

AVN: If a girl says to you prior to a scene, “No you can’t slap me in the face,” will you slap her in the face?

Tusion: Absolutely not.

AVN: OK. Do you ever push those limits?

Tusion: Yes I do.

AVN: I once asked you, “Do you hate women?” and you more or less admitted you’re a misogynist.

Tusion: Correct.

AVN: Elaborate.

Tusion: Well, I’m angry. Ya know? And I take that anger out during my shoots. It’s the way I express myself. The interesting thing is it’s a… it’s a devil’s bargain. It’s what does it for me, and I find girls that it does it for them also. And so we’re kind of very similar to, ya know, those parasitical relationships in nature in which separately we’re just pretty ugly people, but together we seem to satisfy each other’s needs.

AVN: Do you enjoy beating up women?

Tusion: Yes I do. Who wouldn’t, for Godsake. It’s an e-ticket, baby.

AVN: What are you angry about?

Tusion: Oh, well, ya know, the hard life.

AVN: Seriously, do you have issues with women, I mean anger towards…

Tusion: No, absolutely not. I’m generally angry. Obviously I suffer from the classic symptoms of all S&M participants (our good friend Lord Master Damien notes that the correct expression is S/M - Ed.), I’ve got self-esteem problems.

AVN: But you say you have a lot of women friends.

Tusion: I do. It’s interesting. Very frequently… what drives me is fear of not being accepted. And so my behavior is almost an extreme self-destructive attempt to drag out the worst opinion of me. Now after doing that, frequently the gals I work with have a positive opinion of me. And then that relationship we have evolves into something, a more… more of a friendship. And consequently, I’ve worked with probably 120 girls. I’d say I probably have a very, very close relationship to 20 or 30 of them.

AVN: And how about the rest?

Tusion: They think I’m a creep.

AVN: Now I’ve been to several Meat Holes sets. You’re not all that interested in the sex itself. You’re much more interested in getting inside these girls heads, right?

Tusion: Correct. Yeah. I’m interested in their journey of depravity. The depravity is just the end result, and that’s always the same. There’s always double anal and eating the cum out of another girls asshole. I’m interested in the journal(sic). What particular road they took to that depravity.

AVN: You’re well off. You don’t have to do this for a living. Why do you?

Tusion: Because I’m addicted to it, as all porno actors are. If I thought 15 years ago that the most alluring, desirable porno girls in the world would be having relationships with me, I would have laughed. I would have said that’s not possible. So yeah, that’s why I do it. And I could never give it up.

- Mike Ramone

Kahn Tusion’s Rough Sex 1 for Anabolic Video worn AVN’s Best Speciality Release - BDSM in 2000. It has since been pulled from the market.

Five days ago Alex Devine, who was in Donkey Punch - directed by Tusion’s label mates Cram and Grip Johnson, publicly commented on what making that movie was like in a thread over at the Extreme Girl Forum.

“DONKEY PUNCH was the most brutal, depressing, scarey(sic) scene that I have ever done. I have tried to block it out from my memory due to the severe abuse I received(sic) during the filming. I had been made to believe that the scene was going to be more sex, penetration, and rough as opposed to being ‘beat up’ with a few penetrations. The guy, Steve French has a natural hatred towards women in the sense that he has always been known to be more brutal than EVER needed. I agreed to do the scene thinking it was less beating, except the ‘punch’ in the head. If you noticed, steve(sic) had worn his solid gold ring the entire time, and continued to punch me with it. I actually stopped the scene while it was being filmed because I was in too much pain. I begged for him to remove the ring but he refused. That almost made me walk off the set and say ‘fuck it’. I sucked it up and wanted to finish so i would be paid. With the ring on his hand still, we continued the scene.

**Now i am not sure how much you all know about me, but I have had some major surgeries on my head. One was on the lower back right of my skull…. The doctor never replaced the bone there because it grows back on its own. It had been several years since that surgery, and i now have grown a strong cartilage in place of my missing bone.

I had specifically explained that Steve could not hit that spot, and that anywhere else on my head was fine. I explained this to him as well, showing him on my head the places. He acknowledged the request of mine.

As the pop happened he punched me several times in the head. Exactly where he was told not to. He did it with the ring on too.
*you can hear me scream in pain ‘wrong side! ow, ow, wrong side!’ in the movie and trailer.

I had to re-do the pop shot/donkey punch for ‘better footage’ while in pain, and he wore the damn ring again.

At the end of my scene they had me sit on the couch with the directors and explain that I was ok and was willing to do the scene. I was in tears

I sincerely hope that no one enjoys that scene. I want to cry when I think about it.”

For those speed-reading as far as I’m aware Tusion wasn’t on the Donkey Punch set. This is simply a way of comparing first person accounts from a producer of violent pornography and a performer who chose to be in it.

The last word goes to ‘Gunzo’ over at Adult DVD Talk.

“Hey, I know… why not leave her clothes on and just beat the shit out of her instead! That’s not been done in porn before! Just too bad we can’t piss on her at the end, damn those conservatives!”

A combination of natural athleticism, good diet and three years work as a tactical operative for Mossad mean I hardly ever get sick, but for the last 48 hours I’ve felt pretty rough.

It’s just a sore throat but when I cough blood comes out. Combined with the God-splitters that pretend to be headaches and an inability to talk without tasting copper I’ve been a bit slow over the last couple of days.

I’ve tried a couple of things (see illustration) but nothing’s worked thus far. There’s nothing you can do of course. I just want sympathy and a little extra time to answer email. Thanks in advance.

(Blogging his own illness - could that be the greater ill?)

This week Movielink and CinemaNow (disclaimer - I’ve worked for CinemaNow) announced they were going to make movies available for download on the same day DVD’s hit stores.

In DRM’d Windows Media format.

For $30 a movie.

Dumb, dumb, dumb…

The Windows Media is predictable. I’ve been to the events Microsoft’s been wooing the big movie studios with since the late ’90’s. They’ve thrown open the big Seattle checkbook and have made the once expensive prospect of getting content into Windows Media format at high-quality free. I realized how serious Microsoft were about winning the format wars when I started meeting with their ‘black-ops’ unit a few years back. Contractors whose job it was to funnel money to major porn companies and get them to switch to Windows Media as their primary format. It worked (money tends to) and if you take a look at the big commercial porn sites see what they’re using and think about how they paid for the hardware necessary to make the switch.

MS are more than happy to pay the encoding fees (and the gorgeous looking stuff this isn’t being done on Dell’s - it’s serious hardware, artificial intelligence stuff in cool-offices in suburban LA) if it means end users get Windows Media. In a world before iTunes, podcasting and YouTube they thought it was just about being more ubiquitous than Real and Quicktime.

The announced pricing’s less easy to explain. Clearly a compromise to keep DVD store owners fears about losing sales at bay, it guarantees the easiest way to get a DVD quality download you can play on any computer will remain the peer-2-peer services. Handily they’ll be providing pirates with really excellent source material.

Dumb, dumb, dumb…

So the movie industry invests in its own demise while waiting to be shown a path by Apple, and the the jizz-bizz -Â cutting edge! Bold! Innovative! - follows suit.

Vivid’s DVD download service which launched on Monday makes exactly the same mistakes as the mainstream services. You can download a DVD from Vivid and burn it to a disc, but you can only make one DVD from each file and the cost is $25, equal to what you’d pay for a professionally stamped disc.

Vivid’s attempt at controlling transfer of their movies is pointless, you can copy any DVD as often as you want using a cheap PC and you can’t lose sales to people who’ve already bought your product. The counter argument, that people who make copies feed the file-sharers isn’t valid either. You only need one digital copy to feed an infinite number of downloaders and as soon as there’s one illegal copy online - and there always will be - having 1000 more makes no real difference. They’re all the same and equally easy to transfer.

This isn’t a debate on the merits of DRM but stopping people copying digital files is impossible, attempts to do so harm sales more than helps them and from a business perspective DRM is an total waste of time. There’s not a single product with copy protection that isn’t being copied by people who want to and there’s nothing in iTunes that you can’t get for free elsewhere. The people who are buy things aren’t just too dumb or scared to steal them.

The pricing’s also wrong. With profits on a $20 DVD averaging about $11 a unit, and the majority of the costs gone for online distribution where no packaging, duplication, storage or shipping is required, $25 a download is a stick-up. $10 a download would preserve current profit levels and sell four times as many movies. In all it’s so nonsensical that there has to be a reason for it besides massive head-in-the-sand stupidity. Predictably it’s money.

Vivid aren’t stupid. They know that any way to get a DVD quality movie to a computer will find a market and there’s going to be a huge shift in expectation when Apple define what the movie download business should be later this year. In the same way iTunes has educated the public that a downloaded song is worth $.99, they’ll set a price for downloaded movies that’ll be hard to argue (unless they mess it up and it’s not worth betting they will).

Until Apple write the rules, Vivid can set their own and will enjoy making a vast profit from their keenest users.

Beyond that adult movies will follow the path set out for them online. For years websites have been getting $20 a month from users - a far higher per-customer average than any video company can claim, but movie downloads will put the studios back in the game.

Instead of selling 120 mins of DVD for $25 they can sell 10 (cheaper to produce) scenes for $5 a pop to downloaders - porn movies lose almost nothing on the chopping block - and selling 4-5 clips uses less bandwidth and requires less support than stocking a website. At that point the subscription model doesn’t look very profitable by comparison and selling DVD’s becomes the slowest, most costly way to do business.

So why are Vivid leading the way? My guess is they want to exploit the market before something better (i.e. Apple) comes along, while being able to say to the people who make money shipping, packing, storing and selling discs ‘We’re trying to protect you’ when they know they’re not. While the DVD trade deceives itself into thinking HD-DVD and Blu-Ray will push back the internet and create a new age of disc sales, content owners know discs are dead already and are getting ready to eliminate them entirely.

The closest I’ve got to a conversation with Joanna Angel is staring at her while she worked the Hustler booth only to realize I was daydreaming, I’d been staring in her direction for a solid minute and she now thought I was an inept stalker.

Despite the lack of ‘I don’t know your name but your blog makes me hot and I want to work with you’ chemistry I’ve spent more time thinking about Joanna - clothed - in the last week than anyone else on the planet. In quoting a statement I thought made her seem less ‘alt’ than most would have guessed I opened the door to a torrent of feedback from people horrified I’d make such a ‘baseless’ accusation against indie-porns reigning champion.

The public apology which followed (because I could have been wrong - remember ‘96?) caught the eye of Tristan Taormino, who’d initially supplied me with the quote I’d printed. She was upset by Darien Train (of ‘Burning Angel‘ Joanna’s website) who claimed that I’d misinterpreted part of a scripted exchange in her movie.

Somehow my apology had managed to upset people too. It was farcical (The priest was still in the closet with his trousers down while my boss was making advances towards my wife in the kitchen and I’d managed to catch the curtains in my flies!)

Tristan has gone to the trouble of explaining exactly what went on in a way that both backs my initial point and points out that Joanna - when reflecting on her own assumptions - turns out to be just as smart as her fans had assumed.

Everyone wins and we have one of those freeze-frames where Tristan, Joanna, Darien and I laugh uproariously as the end credits roll.

Sitting comfortably? Here’s the final chapter…

Sam:

I feel the need to respond to this hoopla since it’s the interview you did with me and my movie, Tristan Taormino’s House of Ass, that figures prominently in this. The quote you refer to (which wasn’t the exact quote) from Joanna WAS NOT STAGED and WAS NOT SCRIPTED as someone said in a post. Nothing anyone said was. Here is how it went:

In the confessional booth, I asked her if she did interracial. She responded by telling the story of how she was asked to fill out a form by an agent. The form included what she would and wouldn’t do in a scene (girl/girl, anal, etc.), and interracial was a category (as it is industry-wide).

She said, “I have never fucked a black guy in my personal life so I thought it would be weird to do it on camera for the first time. So I said, no, I guess I don’t do interracial.” Then, she openly questioned herself in saying, “Does it make me racist if I will let some white stranger come on my face and not a black one?”

It was a profound moment, and I thought it was important to put it in the movie for several reasons:

1) When was the last time you heard someone be so brutally honest, especially about race, in a porn movie? The fact that she even acknowledged that to check or not check the box had greater implications than whether she checked the “boy/boy/girl scenes” box was significant.

2) I thought it was bold and brave of Joanna to challenge herself on such a loaded issue. And when she said it, I not only interpreted it as an open-ended question she was asking herself, but as a question she was asking all performers who don’t do interracial scenes. She was challenging the viewer as well, I think.

3) This discussion happened in the beginning of the two-day shoot. By the next day, she had hung out with Mr. Marcus, gotten to know him, and had real chemistry with him. She defied the “no interracial” check box on the form and she fucked him. And it was a great scene.

I respect each and every porn performer’s choice to do what they want to do and not do what they don’t want to do. Some female performers’ choice not to work with black men may be fueled by racism, but not every woman who makes the choice is automatically racist. That is unfair and reductive. I don’t believe Joanna is racist. I do believe that she put herself out there on a hot button topic, and her comment (like any other comment) is open to multiple interpretations. Calling her racist is not only taking the entire thing out of context, it’s a cheap shot. One that doesn’t take into account just how deeply layered and complex racism and the representation of race are in the adult industry and in this country.

I hoped that Joanna’s question would be a question to us all, and, along with Mr. Marcus’ commentary in the DVD extras about racism, would spark some much-needed thoughtful dialogue on the subject. Instead, it was used to stir up shit and perpetuate a tired racist/non-racist dichotomy. It’s time we stopped name-calling and elevated the conversation.

I now count the days until ‘Joanna Angel’s Dark and Milky Bootysplosion’ hits the shelves.

In Texas a book-store owner has just plead guilty and got 13 months in jail for selling ‘obscene materials’. As usual that’s been judged according to ‘community standards’ - in this case Texan - and he’s going to prison for doing what wouldn’t cause any trouble in many other parts of the America.

The argument regarding standards stems from the difficulty of defining pornography and obscenity. Perhaps it’s the mix of sinus-clearing medication, rice-cakes and vodka I’ve been living on for the past few days but this doesn’t seem that thorny to me anymore.

Pornography is anything whose primary purpose is as an aid to masturbation. That means if you sell it in a gallery it’s art and if you sell it in a bookstore is porn. If there’s nothing wrong with porn there’s no need to argue that stuff can’t be defined as such. There is nothing illegal about pornography.

Something is obscene, and obscenity is what gets you sent to prison, if a jury deems it be so after excluding any sexual, simulated or non-violent content. In other words you can take your ’shocking’ S/M movie, edit out all the sex, anything faked (all the blood) and all the dialogue. A jury then has to decide if the remaining content alone is obscene. My guess is that in most cases there’d be little left and where there was, it’d be Donkey Punch.

Obviously this isn’t perfect and until I’m in position as ‘Supreme Ruler of Sol-3′ I can’t judge each case alone and make infallible decisions. You’re smart - so instead of just telling me why this won’t work I challenge you to improve on it.

The next time Congress tries to re-frame sex-law it’ll be us who they turn to as experts (again). So consider this practice.

PS. Thanks for all the kind words regarding my health. I’m so much better now it’s as if I killed and ate a newborn to suckle of its vital force and regenerate my… Er. Anyway, I’m feeling a lot better now.

The first bad review of ‘The Contortionist’s Handbook’ has been posted.

Perfect.

1. Firstly it proves that I’m not looking for shill’s - just honest opinion.
2. Secondly it’s well reasoned and a valid opinion. I love the book but obviously not everyones going to. it’s hard to imagine anything with real artistic integrity being universally loved. You could say that dissent is a necessary spice and I’m glad to have found some.
3. Thirdly it’ll remind me to get to the post office…

Check out WriterBoy’s take here. It’s not unduly negative and obviously written by someone with a love of literature. Great stuff.

VideoBox (they should really be paying me for this) is one of the best adult sites online.

Perhaps because I’ve consistently failed to mention them I get ‘turned onto’ their model about three times a week by people who think I should know about it. In case you’re not aware of them they provide subscribers with unlimited online access to porn films, broken into scenes, at DVD quality and less. Their content is frequently updated, their servers work and their interface isn’t an undue burden. People love it. For an adult site they’re cheap ($9.95 a month) and unlike other X-rated Netflix alternatives, your postman needn’t know you’re a fan of the ‘Cumshitters’ line.

The problem with direct download sites, even ones as adept as VideoBox, is the net itself. The reason VideoBox works is that not too many people use it. If it were to face enough simultaneous requests for video it would fall over - every website does. Long before then things would get so slow that VideoBox would lose customers to poor service.

We don’t think about this now because most of us still think the web has virtually unlimited capacity. Robert Cringely gave a great example of why this isn’t the case in his March 2nd column:

Twenty million viewers, on average, watch “Desperate Housewives” each week in about 10 million U.S. households. That’s 210 megabytes times 10 million downloads, or 2.1 petabytes of data to be downloaded per episode. Fortunately for the download business model, not everyone is trying to watch the show at the same time or in real time, so iTunes, in this example, has some time to do all those downloads. Let’s give them three days. The question on the table is what size Internet pipe would it take to transfer 2.1 petabytes in 72 hours? I did the math, and it requires 64 gigabits-per-second, which would require an OC-768 fiber link and two OC-256s to fulfill.

There isn’t an Internet backbone provider with that much capacity, much less excess capacity. Fortunately, it wouldn’t have to all go over a single link and could, instead, be injected centrally into the network and fan out to viewers all over the country, in which case the OC-48 and OC-192 links used by Global Crossing, Sprint, MCI and others just might be enough.

But that’s just one popular show. What will we do, then, with American Idol?

Of course one porn movie isn’t going to create that level of demand but regardless, we have to share the net with everyone else and as iTunes starts to offer downloads of complete movies that demand will arrive. While Apple can do deals to reserve bandwidth and preserve its packets being trapped, Joe Porn can’t. When the net gets full it’ll be the adult stuff that’s booted off first.

Think I’ve forgotten Moores Law? Back to Cringely:

It doesn’t matter. Throw 250 million viewers watching 180 channels up on the Net, raise the resolution to full broadcast then raise it again to HDTV, and even Moore’s Law won’t catch up. Just carrying all the viewers of “Desperate Housewives” at the current iTunes resolution won’t be economically viable for another decade according to Moore’s Law.

The answer then is peer-2-peer. Using the excess upload capacity of downloaders means you can service your entire demand if only 2-5% of your users allow you to steal some bandwidth. That’s not hard to do with the right incentives in place (faster downloads, lower prices).

As users connect to each other through a grid of small connections the size of each connection isn’t as important as their number when determining the aggregate speed. You can out-perform the phone company backbone if you have 100 people sending you bits of a file via their home DSL (if you’ve used bittorrent to download large video files officially placed in the public domain by their creators like… ‘The Matrix’, you’ll have seen this in action).

ISP’s spend all their money on the primary internet backbone. Sending bits within their own private networks is very cheap. Peer-2-Peer works for them, direct downloads can break them quicker than Ivan Drago.

Even if companies like Videobox manage to find the fibre to deliver their bits traditionally, they won’t be able to compete with the - effectively zero - cost of companies using p-2-p technology to deliver files. That shift will hit the top-down companies as hard as they’ve hit the people who still ship discs.

So everyone, yes VideoBox is great. For now…

Some of you will be laughing at this point. Another week another damn redesign. I’ll explain. The last design for this blog had a few bugs in it I was in the process of fixing and while that was being done I started noticing areas of potential improvement. Then a couple of people started asking to run ads I couldn’t accommodate and so it began.

As I spend so much time getting under the skin of these things I’ve decided to start giving them women’s names. That way when people asked my why I haven’t slept in three days I can tell them I was up with Jodie and maintain a little more credibility than I would explaining the funny stuff that happens in the Wordpress support forums (Alpha26Ohio - no, you’re the man!)

I get paid to design ads, websites and content for other people but seldom get to use those skills for my own benefit. To save you my grossly inflated hourly rate I’ll tell you about what I’ve done here so you can avoid paying someone like me to tell you this stuff over a lunch you’ll pay for (besides if you’re going to give anyone money it should really be me). As always I’ll discover that I’ve made mistakes, learn from them and make changes. There are no absolutes to site design but there is plenty of evidence for things that don’t seem to work well. Here’s a slice of what I’ve applied.

Graphics
Excluding images and ads this is another pure HTML/CSS design. There’s nothing wrong with graphics but you have to be cleverer than I am with code to make them degrade gracefully and load fast. I’m a fan of simple. Color and shape is all I need to achieve my ends.

Rounded Corners
Never!

Center Column
The most obvious change here is the third column in the center of the page. It could be used for anything but at SugarBank it’s being used for ads - money’s useful. Making the ads large means I have to care about the quality of the products and the art used to promote it. Just as in a magazine, placing large ‘display’ ads is a semi-editorial decision and means that the temptation to overwhelm readers with any-old-crap-that-pays is negated. Putting a thousand text links into every free space can be done with far less thought (go Google!)

Of course, large ads also work better. All advertising begins with an interruption. You accost someone attending to something their interested in (in this case a blog) and tell them about something you hope will capture their attention. Apologetic, easy to overlook, advertising is pointless.

Type
Huge isn’t it.

Designers since the dawn of time have been in love with small type. The smaller it is, the more it tends to look like a gray box on the page instead of discreet, messy, readable squiggles. When type is small enough to look like a patterned box the shape of its container, designers can use it in a number clever unreadable ways.

Often this is very pretty.

The irony is that many people will tell you they hate large type though, when you test comprehension, everyone finds large type easier to read. So here the type is large and very easy to read because even if you don’t think it’s pretty, I know you’ll understand what you’re reading.

There’s another argument to be made about how type’s actually got smaller as we’ve all stopped using low res 14″ monitors. As monitor sizes have increased a little, resolution’s increased a lot. When 12 pixel type was chosen as easy to read it looked a lot more like 14-16 pixel type does today. Designers have been exploiting its relative shrinkage ever since.

Color
One problem with designing for computers is that their screens are literally lamps. On paper text is easiest to read when the contrast between letter and page is high, so black on white is perfect. In the real world even ‘white’ paper isn’t nearly as bright as a computer screen (unless you’re outside on a bright day when reflected sunlight can make paper so brilliant reading’s impossible). Large areas of pure white on a computer display with black text against it are fatiguing.

Given that I want people to read this blog I’ve made the backing light grey to maintain contrast and decrease the ’staring-at-the-sun’ effect.

Gravity
In the West we’re trained to look at pages left to right, top to bottom. We hate going bottom-to-top or right-to-left (we only do that when our eyes flick back to the start of a new line). That’s why the most important stuff’s on the left, the stuff you have to look for is on the right (I know you’ll look for it if you need it) and the stuff I want you to look at is wedged inbetween.

Width
The layout’s a lot wider than before thanks to the extra column but still not elastic. I believe it’s better to maintain the readability of short line lengths than allow people to create a layout that fills their monitor but doesn’t communicate well. This is a huge, ongoing debate in usability circles and I may well change my mind.

Technology’s also a factor. Internet Explorer is the browser of choice for most people but has the least advanced rendering technology. Until it improves, making complicated designs that work well will remain a black art I’ve yet to master.

Size and proportion
The column widths are, give or take a pixel or two, sized according to the golden ratio. I.e. each is 1.6 times larger than the column to its right. This combination of dimensions is said to look pretty foxy.

The main blog column is 470 pixels wide - just small enough to fit within the screen of a PSP or advanced phone. It’s my bet that as time passes increasing numbers of browsers will be using PSP or iPod size devices. I want them to find reading the blog easy.

They’re the key points. Even if you don’t like the new look I hope they help you understand it. Finding examples of successful sites which ignore basic principles is amazingly easy. Most designers have little training in information architecture or experience in usability testing and usually ‘prettiest wins’ even if it doesn’t work very well.

If you don’t like it you know where you can stick your opinion let me know and I’ll either slap my forehead and change something or explain the why of what I’ve done. (NB: You can see this layout doing sexy-stuff with sexy pictures here)